SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
At 11.35 today Sir John Chilcott’s long awaited inquiry into the Iraq War is released to the public. It is expected to be critical of a number of high ranking officials.
Commissioned by Gordon Brown in 2009, the report has been subject to long delays and runs to some 2.6 million words. Many family members of British soldiers killed in Iraq fear a ‘whitewash’ and point out that we don’t need an enquiry to see that ‘Iraq’s actually worse than what is was before we went in’.
Colonel Tim Collins, made famous by his inspirational eve-of-battle speech at the outset of the war in 2003 also believes ‘we shattered Iraqi society’ the very opposite of the instructions he gave his troops to ‘tread lightly there’.
The utility of a report of such magnitude is debatable and it seems unlikely that it will ever be read in full. To give it some context the King James bible runs to 783, 137 words, the Qur’an is a comparatively slender 77, 934 words while War and Peace weighs in at 587, 287 words.
Sir John Chilcot now hopes that ‘many lessons’ can be learned from his report but had it been shorter, had it been delivered sooner could the lessons of Iraq been applied to Afghanistan?
He has said that future, military action should only be embarked on, if ‘really careful challenge analysis and assessment’ is applied to it. This sounds so extraordinarily obvious it hardly warrants a further 2,599,994 words but the implication – and the evidence – is clear. Britain entered the Iraq war without careful analysis and both Britain and Iraq have paid a heavy price for this folly.
The evidence also suggests that precisely the same mistakes have been made in Afghanistan. Like Iraq, Afghanistan is spiralling into civil war with violence and corruption endemic. Helmand Province is now a battleground between Taliban and Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) – a battle the insurgents appear to be winning – and where poppy cultivation and opium production continues unchecked.
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
Last weekend saw a long overdue return to Gooseberry Hall. The sun shone, as it always seems to do whenever we visit, and I was reminded of an immaculate Afghan homecoming in April 2012:
‘It was a perfect spring day and Rob picked me up in his fancy open top two‑seater sports car. It’s a car I’ve always coveted. With the roof down and the wind in our hair we flew north along the A429 under azure spring skies, through pristine Cotswold countryside dotted with ancient limestone villages and market towns with quintessential English names; Stow‑on‑the‑Wold, Moreton‑in‑Marsh, Stretton‑on‑Fosse. It was all in perfect contrast to the dry barren dashte which makes up so much of Helmand Province.
Britain was flirting with me that afternoon, displaying her beauty, tantalising me with her delights, proving – if proof were needed – that she was worth defending, even if it meant fighting a war over 3,500 miles away.
At my request, we stopped for a pint at the Virgins and Castle in the historic town of Kenilworth. Built in the fifteenth century, about the same time as the siege of Herat, it first became a pub in 1563 when Britain was still burning Protestants at the stake for heresy.
At that time Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, Akbar the Great, the third and greatest ruler of the Mughal Dynasty controlled the Gereshk valley and much of the rest of Afghanistan. Little has changed in the largely rural district of Nahr‑E‑Saraj in the intervening four and a half centuries, except that under Akbar the Mughal Dynasty was a model of religious tolerance, encompassing Islamic, Hindu, Christian and Buddhist faiths.
In truth I needed a bit of Dutch courage before being reunited with Harry and Alfie. I hadn’t spoken to them since we’d said our goodbyes in the school playground back in January. Although I’d written to them every couple of days, I hadn’t received any return mail. I’d missed them terribly and thought of them often but I had to steel myself for the possibility that they might be less eager to see their Dad than their Dad was to see them.
Gooseberry Hall lies to the north of Kenilworth Castle in the heart of the Warwickshire countryside and is about as far removed from Main Operating Base Price as it’s possible to be. There are no battle tanks parked on the magnificent lawn. Its walls are not adorned with Lads Mags pin‑ups or mimetic cock art. There are no Apache helicopters flying overhead.
To my very great delight it seemed my fears had been unfounded. I didn’t even make it to the front door before Alfie threw himself into my arms, clinging to me in a fierce embrace as I was nearly knocked off my feet by his brother Harry.
It was indescribably good to see them, hear them, smell them, touch them. I held them both tight for as long as I was able until they finally felled me like an old tree, collapsing onto the lawn in a bundle of giggling, laughing, writhing limbs.
Afghanistan serves as a constant reminder of the fragile and tenuous grip with which all life clings to planet earth – something it’s easy to forget in our cosseted lives in the west. Even without the armed conflict being waged inside its borders, it is a harsh and unforgiving place.
Average life expectancy is just 44 years. Pregnancy rather than insurgency is one of the primary causes of premature death. According to the World Health Organisation, one Afghan woman in 11 will die of causes related to pregnancy and birth during her childbearing years. In neighbouring Tajikistan, that figure is one in 430, while in Austria, it is one in 14,300. It’s a figure that dwarfs the estimated 21,000 deaths resulting from the conflict since 2003.
Being reacquainted with life’s cruelty and suffering heightens the appreciation of simple pleasures. Rolling around on Gooseberry Hall’s manicured lawn with my kids was an unforgettable reunion, a moment of pure, unrestrained joy that I will treasure my whole life and take with me, smiling, to my grave.
As my anxieties melted away we were joined by the rest of the Gooseberry Hall Gang (GHG), a chaotic, happy‑go‑lucky collective of kids and pets who all call Gooseberry Hall home and who filled the air with noise and laughter as we played in the sunset.
It was a beautiful evening and the perfect homecoming.’
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
Former Grenadier Guardsman and Afghan veteran, Carl Shadrake is an extraordinary young man who knows the pain and anguish of close quarter battle better than any other living Briton.
On his first tour of Afghanistan in 2007 the vehicle he was travelling in was targeted by a suicide bomber, killing the driver and seriously injuring Carl. After a long recovery Carl returned to his unit, 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards and five years later deployed to Afghanistan for a second time in 2012.
Four months into this tour, whilst on a foot patrol, a colleague close to him detonated an improvised explosive device, losing both his legs. Badly wounded himself by the blast, Carl’s first concern was getting his wounded comrade to safety. It was only after a rescue helicopter had evacuated them both to Camp Bastion that Carl realised the extent of his own injuries.
Carl was put into a medically induced coma and flown by aeromed to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. It was here, a month later that he learned the tragic news that his younger brother, Jamie, also serving in Afghanistan, had been shot and killed.
Despite everything he and his family have been through he speaks with such modesty and humility when measuring his own sacrifice with those of the 19,240 soldiers who died on the first day of the Somme.
It’s impossible not to contrast the measured tones of this extraordinary man with those of our grasping, self-serving politicians as they jockey for position in the race to lead their respective parties.
Anuj Chopra reports that the Taliban are using child sex slaves to mount crippling insider attacks on police in southern Afghanistan, exploiting the pervasive practice of bacha bazi – paedophilic ‘boy play’ – prevalent inHelmand.
Taliban use ‘honey trap’ boys to kill Afghan police
This sickening practice, condemned by the Taliban, is prevalent across Helmand where young boys become the object of lustful attraction for powerful police commanders. ISAF not only failed to stamp out this vile bent but also shamefully excused it as ancient custom. The Nahr-E-Saraj District Chief of Police was no exception:
“Next on the list was the District Chief of Police, the appropriately abbreviated D‑CoP, Ghullie Khan. Like his boss the Governor, the D‑CoP was predictably involved in the narcotics business. To supplement this income he also used the Afghan Uniformed Police (AUP) department he commanded to collect illegal taxes from local citizens. There were a number of ISAF apologists who defended this unlawful activity as ‘culturally normal’. I even read a paper on the subject, quite possibly published by the DCSU, the same organisation that had come up with the wizard idea of FEOs and then assigned them male interpreters.
Personally, I was deeply sceptical of this point of view. The truth was that ISAF seemed powerless to prevent the endemic corruption that pervaded every level of the AUP, and not a little ashamed that the primary source of these illegal taxes was a levy on the use of the main highways that bisected the district – all of which had been funded at great expense with international aid.
No one in ISAF was really sure how much the illegal taxation business was worth in Nahr‑E‑Saraj but it wasn’t petty cash. Ghullie Khan had previously been a senior police officer in the neighbouring district of Sangin. He had been removed from this post after an ISAF investigation revealed that he’d been sodomizing little boys there. In the wake of this scandal his boss, Nabi Elham – the Provincial Chief of Police – naturally promoted him to be top cop in Nahr‑E‑Saraj, although it was rumoured that he’d first demanded a bribe of half a million US dollars.
There were ISAF papers defending paedophilia and bribery as culturally normal activities too, although I didn’t waste any time reading them. Culturally normal or not, I reckoned that the citizens of those countries that had helped to fund the district’s new highways would be dismayed to learn that they were now being used to line the pockets of a known pederast, drug baron and all round bad guy.
Ghullie’s favourite son, Zaibiullah was a chip off the old block and had followed his father into the AUP. When a local shopkeeper failed to pay his taxes on time he tied his arms and legs together and drowned him into the Nahr‑E‑Buhgra canal to teach him a lesson. Such was Zaibiullah’s intellect that it was possible to imagine him warning the drowning man that next time he failed to pay Zaibiullah would put a bullet in his head.
It was just as possible to imagine some obscure ISAF department publishing a paper defending drowning as a culturally normal method of deterrence in much the same way that waterboarding was a culturally normal interview technique in the United States.
Neither Ghullie Khan’s parenting skills, nor his predilection for underage boys, nor any of the myriad illegal activities over which he presided as the district’s chief upholder of law and order did much to temper his indignation when he learned of the Qur’an burnings.
However, unlike their Governor or their Police Chief, and despite our worst fears, the residents of Gereshk seemed unmoved by the turmoil engulfing the rest of the country. We waited with bated breath but much to our surprise there were no violent demonstrations, the bazaars remained open, and even the local Taliban’s attempts to exploit the situation seemed half‑hearted.
If I’d thought there was any chance I could pull it off I would have attributed this muted response to my brilliant engagement plan, but even I had to admit that this was unlikely. There were other forces at work here.
In stark contrast, a few months later angry protests ensued following a series of mysterious child abductions. The most likely explanation was that the D‑CoP had resumed his paedophile activities and this was certainly what the citizens of Gereshk appeared to have concluded. Directing most of their anger towards him in a number of emergency shuras, they demanded that he return their children and bugger off, literally, back from where he came.
In MOB Price our intelligence analysts scratched their heads in wonder. What were the citizens of Gereshk so upset about? Surely child abduction was just another one of those culturally normal activities that we Westerners couldn’t get our heads around?
We were at a loss as to what all the fuss was about and lobbied hard for Ghullie Khan to keep his job. Yes, he was a terrible father; yes, he was corrupt; yes, he was a kiddy fiddler; yes, he was facilitating the illicit opium trade but his Danish Civilian Police mentors assured us he was still much better than the last guy, or than any of his potential successors.”
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
Jonathan Bennett surfed his way through a midlife crisis. Finding himself ‘without a job, without a girlfriend and without a home’ he decided to go surfing.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/jonathan-bennett/
The start and end point of our respective crises seem remarkably similar. I too found myself contemplating a failed relationship and a failing business while dossing down in an empty house. Jonathan’s answer was to buy a clapped out camper van and surf his way round Britain, sleeping by the sea and washing with a sponge and a pan of warm water. I chose instead to relocate to a landlocked country 3,500 miles away to fight the war on terror, also washing with a sponge and a pan of warm water. We have both written books chronicling our crises; Around the Coast in Eighty Waves and SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand.
And that’s not all we have in common. Jonathan says “surfing is about launching yourself into the unknown and hoping for the best,” which is not so very different from the British Army’s initial deployment into Helmand Province.
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
LCpl James Ashworth VC, 1st Bn Grenadier Guards was killed in action on this day four years ago in the district of Nahr-E-Saraj, Helmand Province.
James Ashworth – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
LCpl James Ashworth epitomizes the courage and professionalism of all British soldiers whose sacrifice in Helmand has been confounded by incompetence, corruption and deceit.
By tragic coincidence I learned today from a friend in the neighbouring district of Nad Ali that “Nahre Saraj all Taliban. Just Gereshk bazaar government”. This confirms reports from Kabul that much of Helmand Province is either under siege or already in the hands of the Taliban.
In 2013 Catriona Laing, the head of the Helmand PRT earnestly pronounced: “We have presented the people of Helmand with an opportunity. They have grabbed it enthusiastically, confidently… it’s now in their hands for the future.”
I wonder what she would say today?
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
My friend Niels Vistisen presented his co-authored report Afghanistan, Lessons Identified 2001 – 2014 to the Danish Parliament today. Niels was Political Adviser (POLAD) to Salim Rodi, the Governor of Nahr-E-Saraj in 2012. I’m most struck by the report’s observation: ‘It became increasingly obvious that even though ISAF won all of the battles, NATO was not winning the war.’
The Royal Danish Defence College was tasked to ‘investigate the stabilisation efforts and military operations in Afghanistan to establish how they were integrated and concerted and assess where possible their outcomes in relation to the indicators of progress, i.e. security, governance and development.’
I saw very little evidence of integration of effort in Afghanistan and this was a constant source of frustration:
“The clearance op would stir up a hornets’ nest, making Yakchal a dangerous and unpleasant place to live in the process, but there was no plan to hold the ground for more than a few days once it had been cleared. The insurgents would quickly return once we had departed.
When I briefed the DST members on the plan they looked at me blankly. I had naïvely assumed they would want to exploit the temporary security bubble our presence would create to deliver some positive stabilisation effect. A polio vaccination programme perhaps, a shura to engage with their elected representatives, some infrastructure project such as dredging or repairing the complex irrigation system that was the only source of water so far from the Helmand River.
Anything that might add some truth to the fiction that a better life lay ahead with GIRoA.
Bruno, the DST leader looked confused, but some of the other team members visibly flushed with anger and stamped out of the briefing room. Bruno explained: ‘We don’t really get involved with what the military are doing and have our own projects and priorities.’ I’d managed to seriously upset some of his colleagues by daring to suggest that we might work together for the common good.
So much for the ‘Comprehensive Approach’ as defined in the joint doctrine manual on ‘Security and Stabilisation’. As with so many of the doctrine manuals I’d read, the authors appeared to have gone to great efforts creating complex definitions to describe relatively simple concepts. In this case:
‘The comprehensive approach is broader than cross‑government, it is also a multi‑agency and usually a multinational response. Mutually‑supporting cross‑departmental and multi‑agency effort should enable comprehensive tactical activity to deliver overwhelming campaign effect. The military will set the security conditions and lead on aspects of Security Sector Reform (SSR) such as military capacity‑building. Civilian state and non‑state institutions lead on: governance; engagement and reconciliation; police and justice sector reform; restoration of basic services and infrastructure; economic and financial development; and longer‑term social and infrastructure development.’
In 1933, Colonel (later Field Marshal) Irwin Rommel stated: ‘The British write some of the best doctrine in the world; it is fortunate that their officers do not read it.’
I’d read a lot of doctrine as I’d prepared for Afghanistan and couldn’t agree with his assessment of the quality. Much of it seemed impenetrable and verbose to me. But at least I had read it. It appeared that my colleagues in the DST had not.
This was to be a recurring theme of my time in Afghanistan. Whenever we mounted a major operation I would appeal to the DST to follow up with some governance, engagement or infrastructure activity to deliver overwhelming campaign effect, but this was always considered to be too difficult or not a priority for them. Even though some of the DST members were to become my friends, by the end of my time in Helmand I was barely able to conceal my contempt for their organisation’s woeful contribution to the mission.”
Although Niels’ report does not mention it, the most obvious outcome in relation to the indicators of progress is staring us all in the face: The Taliban control most of rural Helmand Province. All of the contested ground over which British and Danish troops fought is now in the hands of the Taliban and, if the current reports from Afghanistan are accurate, Helmand is ‘on the verge of collapse’ with the towns of Gereshk and Lashka Gah under siege.
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
George Allison reports for the UK Defence Journal – motto ‘Impartial and Current’ (snigger) – that British strikes have killed 1,000 Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq since bombing began with zero civilian casualties.
British strikes kill 1,000 Islamic State militants, no civilians
I don’t doubt the RAF take great care to avoid civilian casualties but war is an ugly business and we’ve heard this kind of thing before. In fact, little has changed since 1758 when Samuel Johnson observed: ‘Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.’
It was much the same in Afghanistan and I can’t help but wonder at the assessment criteria which judged those 1,000 to be IS fighters.
“According to an October 2011 study by the Afghanistan Analysts Network simply being a facilitator was enough to be assigned a codename and subjected to priority effects. The report examined the effectiveness of controversial ISAF night raids aimed at decapitating the Taliban on the battlefield by removing their commanders. This was a tactic much favoured by General Petreus who had replaced McChrystal after his motormouth got the better of him. It revealed that the words leader and facilitator were sometimes used interchangeably in ISAF press releases, although facilitator could just be someone whose house an insurgent group was thought to have used.
The study also revealed that these night raids were not exactly a precision tool. For every leader killed eight other people also died. Since ISAF was very careful not to kill civilians I presumed these other eight must all be insurgent facilitators. American Special Forces were particularly adept at avoiding civilian casualties.
In the first few weeks of our tour I’d been approached by a US Navy Seal team running a Village Stability Operation¹ in Parschow, an area just south of Main Operating Base (MOB) Price. The Seals had been in contact with the enemy when they witnessed a young boy being callously gunned down by insurgents as they fled the scene. The Seals were keen to be first to the truth with the news and wanted to use the MOB Price radio to communicate the brutal and heartless disregard for human life which the Taliban had displayed.
Since isolating the insurgents from the population is a cornerstone of counter‑insurgency operations, this seemed like a good idea to me and I readily agreed, asking only that the Seals provide me with a few more facts before I could produce a transcript. I also explained that I would need approval from Task Force Helmand for broadcast, which needn’t be a problem but was a factor in determining the speed with which we could get the message into the public domain.
The Seal team leader seemed reluctant to submit to a British chain of command but promised to get back to me with more details. When he returned a short while later, he revealed that it might in fact have been a stray American round that tragically killed the boy after he was caught in crossfire. The incident, as with all incidents involving civilian casualties, would now be subject to an internal review. All reporting on the subject would be postponed until this had been completed. I inwardly breathed a sigh of relief that I’d not been tempted to step outside the Task Force Helmand (TFH) reporting chain in order to assist the Seals. In the light of these new details it would have shown appallingly poor judgement on my part which, quite rightly, would have cost me my job.
The next morning I again bumped into the Seal team leader outside the DST office. He cheerily informed me that there was no longer any need for an enquiry. The casualty was not after all an innocent young boy but a baby‑faced Talib fighter whose body had been recovered along with an AK47 rifle. He now wanted me to report a great victory in which ISAF had protected the people of Parschow from vicious insurgents, one of whom had been killed in the battle. Promising to look into it, I made myself scarce.”
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
¹Village Stability Operation (VSO). A US Special Operations Force initiative the aim of which was to provide enhanced security, governance, and development in strategically important rural areas critical to the Afghanistan campaign but beyond the effective reach of the Afghan government and U.S. conventional forces. It was perhaps insightful that the Parschow VSO was just 3 km due south of Gereshk, the seat of GIRoA District Governance and home to the District Police Headquarters, the main Afghan National Army base and ISAF’s Main Operating Base Price yet still beyond the reach of the Afghan government and US conventional forces.
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book
SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.
SPIN ZHIRA 