3 Para. Patrick Bishop
eighteen to a tent.’ The ablutions blocks were not completed and grey pools of waste water seeped into the gritty sand.
Other units at the base seemed to fare better than the new arrivals. Farmer speculated that there was an ingrained army belief that ‘the Paras liked that sort of stuff’. In the end they just got on with it, living out of their bergen rucksacks.
Stuart Tootal, who reached Bastion on 18 April, was more concerned with how the base would be resupplied. As it stood, it was reliant on a fragile air bridge provided by the Chinooks and Hercules. The lack of comfort did not worry him too much. His overriding preoccupation was getting his battle group into place as quickly as possible. The camp conditions, however, were a major concern to the Permanent Joint Headquarters staff who oversaw the operation from thousands of miles away in Northolt, Middlesex. They preferred to hold the remaining troops of the battle group back until Bastion was in a fit state to receive them. Tootal was frustrated at their caution. Dribbling his men into theatre risked losing the initiative. His view was that
[we] were an expeditionary army and we should be able to go out into the field and set up. I was quite prepared to say we’ll just live in the desert. We’ll live off rations and draw water because there’s plenty of water we can access. We’ll shit in holes and we’ll burn it off. We’re going to be dusty and we’re going to be uncomfortable. But actually, I’ve got all my fighting power with me.
In the end it was more than four weeks before all his infantry elements arrived. There was a further wait before key assets such as the artillery were in place. The Household Cavalry light armoured squadron did not reach the battle group until 10 July.
Fortunately for 3 Para, the Taliban were not yet ready to declare the fighting season open. The poppy harvest was about to begin. Once it got under way, the fields along the great river valleys that plough north to south through Helmand would be full of toiling men, women and children. The process was simple. First, the harvesters made four light incisions with a multi-bladed razor in the head of the poppy. They left it for a few days for the sticky, milky sap to collect. Then they returned to scrape it off with a wooden spatula. Each head had to be scraped up to seven times to collect all the ‘milk’. The sap was shaped into slabs which were sold at established markets. They were then passed on for processing and transporting, increasing in value at every stage until the refined product reached the streets of Europe’s towns and cities as cellophane ‘wraps’ of dirty, brownish powder.
The poppy farmers sold their crops to local drug lords, who sold it on to the processors. Helmand province was reputed to supply 20 per cent of the world’s opium. The growers were expecting 2006 to produce a bumper crop – 50 per cent up on the previous year. When the Taliban were in power they had opposed the trade, coming close to eradicating production. But now they were trying to wrest back the power they had lost and were anxious not to antagonise either the peasants or the landowners who exploited them. Poppy was a vital part of the economy. Even a poor tenant farmer could expect to make £1,000 from a plot of land less than 100 yards square, a sum that went a long way in Helmand.
In their new, collaborative mood, the Taliban promised to suspend fighting so as not to disrupt the harvest. In return they could call on local chieftains to supply them with reinforcements from their private militias. They also imposed an opium tax which raised tens of millions of dollars to fund their supply and armaments needs. Until the opium had been sold, it seemed the Taliban were content to watch and wait.
Support for the eradication of the opium trade had been one of the stated aims of the British deployment. It was never explicitly said, though, that the military would be used to destroy crops. None of the senior commanders involved in the operation had any intention of doing so. Creating stability for reconstruction to take place depended on winning the consent, or at least the tolerance, of the local population. Burning poppy fields was a sure way of turning potentially friendly farmers and their dependants against the latest batch of foreigners in uniform to descend on the province. Tootal believed it was completely unrealistic to tackle the opium problem without providing an alternative livelihood that came close to matching the income local farmers made from the poppies. The problem had been around for decades. No one had yet come up with a viable solution. However desirable it may have appeared to politicians in London and Washington, the folly of busting up the local economy was fully appreciated by every soldier in Afghanistan, from the Toms all the way up to the incoming ISAF commander, General Richards.
3 Para’s area of operations was the ‘Triangle’. This was the district bounded by Camp Bastion, the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah and the market town of Gereshk, the second largest place in Helmand, which lay about 20 miles to the north-east of the base. This was considered a relatively benign environment. It was the most developed region of the province, where there was sufficient existing infrastructure for the reconstruction programme to build on. Both towns lay on the Helmand river. Most of the province was barren. The area around Bastion was called Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death. But the waters of the river were channelled into a web of ditches and canals, creating a broad band of fertile land that sustained life along the valley.
The central Afghan government controlled the two towns but had little authority in the villages. There was a belief that the Taliban regarded the area as something of a sanctuary and chose not to draw attention to themselves. ‘The level of enemy activity was low because actually there wasn’t a lot for them to fight and they were really being allowed to do their own thing,’ said one officer.
The original plan was for the Paras to begin patrolling in the towns and the surrounding areas, advertising their presence and creating an atmosphere of stability. It was classic ‘ink spot’ strategy. According to Martin Taylor the intention was ‘to go into small villages and say “Are the Taliban operating here? We can offer you this, we can offer you that.” If they tell us what their problem is – say that they don’t have running water – then we would get the guys in who could bring them running water. If there were no schools then we would get engineers in to build them schools.’ ‘A’ Company saw its job as identifying what needed to be done. It was then the task of the civil servants of the DfID to come in and make it happen. This, as it was to turn out, was a very optimistic expectation.
The Paras approached the task with genuine enthusiasm. In its short life, the regiment had become a much more flexible and subtle organism than in its early years. Its suitability for any task less than full-scale war fighting had been called into question by the events of 30 January 1972 in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, forever known as Bloody Sunday. The Troubles were at their height and 1 Para had been brought into the city to support the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who were policing a protest march. The demonstration was organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. By now, though, it was the gunmen and bombers of the Provisional IRA who controlled the direction of the Catholics’ struggle for equality.
The march was illegal and the Paras had been given the job of arresting the leading ‘hooligans’. As expected, the gathering quickly turned into a riot. In the confusion the Paras opened fire. When the chaos subsided it was revealed that they had killed thirteen males. Six of them were seventeen years old.
The deaths gave the IRA a propaganda coup and cast a long shadow over the reputation of the Paras. The charge against them was that they had indiscriminately killed unarmed innocents. These accusations were taken seriously by audiences in Britain, America and Europe. An inquiry under Lord Justice Widgery found that none of the dead or wounded had been shot while handling a firearm or bomb. It also judged that there was ‘no reason to suppose that the soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been fired upon first’. Their training had, however, made them ‘aggressive and quick in decision and some showed more restraint in opening fire than others’.
The charge of mindless violence was to hang around for years. Despite the controversy, the Paras continued to serve in Northern Ireland throughout the period. They were sent in as peacekeepers to Kosovo after the NATO deployment in 1999. By the time they arrived in Afghanistan they had millions of man-hours of experience handling the complexities of operating among civilian populations against a hidden enemy and a fine-tuned understanding of when to shift emphasis. ‘Yes, we have a reputation for being very aggressive,’ said Stuart Tootal.