3 Para. Patrick Bishop
was able to take hold there.
The effort was meant to be coordinated through the ‘Triumvirate’ made up of the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and DfID. DfID had a presence in Lashkar Gah, where the PRT was supposed to have its headquarters. Until there was stability and security in Helmand, however, there was little for the department to do. The functioning of the Triumvirate was hampered by personnel problems. The head of the MoD’s Civil–Military Cooperation (CIMIC) team was unhappy in his post, and on 21 April it was agreed that he should return home.
At the same time, DfID’s attitude was causing the Paras bafflement and dismay. The department’s officials seemed anxious not to be associated too closely with the military presence for fear that they would come to be regarded as the enemy by the people who they were there to help.
Their approach was exemplified by the story of the Gereshk hospital washing machine. Captain Harvey Pynn, 3 Para’s regimental Medical Officer, had taken up the cause of providing a functioning laundry for the hospital. It was just the sort of ‘quick impact project’ the soldiers were supposed to identify and pursue.
Pynn came from a military background. His father was in the RAF and his grandfather had been an RSM in the Parachute Regiment in the 1950s and 1960s. He was attracted to an army career but he also felt a vocational pull towards medicine. He combined the two by joining the Royal Army Medical Corps after studying at Guy’s and St Thomas’s. Following a stint with the Royal Greenjackets he joined 3 Para in the summer of 2005.
In normal times the MO’s job was to look after the general health of the battalion. In war, there was the crucial duty of keeping the wounded alive until they could receive proper treatment. Pynn believed in being where the fighting was going on. He got his wish. The battle group overturned the normal procedure and posted their doctors forward with individual companies rather than keeping them back at base. He and other battle group MOs were to find themselves doing most of their work in the platoon houses, rather than at the high-tech hospital that had been set up at Bastion.
Pynn had a strong idealistic streak. He took the development side of the mission very seriously. When ‘A’ Company deployed in Gereshk he set to work surveying the health provisions in town. He was welcomed at the hospital and shown round. The conditions were grim. There was a resident surgeon and anaesthetist but very little equipment. Above all, the place was dirty, and bloodstained sheets littered the trauma room.
What they did have was a washing machine, which had been given to the hospital by USAID, the American international development agency, some time before. It sat there, still wrapped in factory plastic, useless without a water supply to plumb it in to. Pynn thought it would be a simple job for the battle group engineers to sink a well. It was cheap, easy and a palpable demonstration of the soldiers’ goodwill.
The DfID office in Lashkar Gah was told of the plan. Word came back that there was no question of military engineers being allowed to do the work. The hospital was part of the Afghan healthcare system and an Afghan non-governmental organisation had already been given the contract. As far as the soldiers were aware, no NGO had been near the hospital. But the issue was a political one and they were forced to let it drop.
The failure to implement such a trivial piece of assistance did nothing for DfID’s reputation with the soldiers. Their inability to carry out quick-impact projects (QIPs) was a continuing source of frustration for ‘A’ Company. Tootal shared their feelings. He made regular, forceful appeals to his superiors in the PRT, stressing the need for action. At a meeting at the Kandahar airbase, the NATO headquarters in southern Afghanistan, on 13 May he argued that DfID were wasting an opportunity. His men were unable to deliver small, goodwill-building measures not because of a lack of resources, but because of a bureaucratic doctrine. The Paras thought DfID’s reluctance to associate with the military was naive. Most people in Afghanistan lumped all foreigners together. The first troops in Gereshk spent much of their time explaining that they were British. The locals assumed that any foreigner in uniform was American. The soldiers believed DfID would do better to work around perceived problems rather than surrender to them. After the meeting, Tootal went off to have dinner with the DfID reps. The potential for further disagreement was cut short when the meal had to be abandoned owing to one of the regular, but largely ineffective, Taliban rocket attacks on the base.
The Triumvirate structure did not render decision-making easy. But the complexities of the military chain of command complicated matters yet further.
It was Tootal’s misfortune throughout 3 Para’s tour to have to answer to several bosses. The multiplicity of nations and organisations involved in Afghanistan meant that direction came from a number of sources. The result was a lack of clarity about aims and coherence in achieving them that fogged the mission throughout.
When the Para battle group arrived in Afghanistan the Americans were in overall charge. They operated under the banner of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), which had been launched in the wake of 9/11. They were due to hand over command to the NATO-led ISAF, headed by the British general David Richards, at the end of July.
ISAF operations in the south were controlled by a Canadian brigade, led by Brigadier General David Fraser. 16 Air Assault Brigade operated under the Canadians. Its boss, Brigadier Ed Butler, did not have a formal tactical role in the Canadian chain of command. A joint command had been ruled out, and it was deemed improper for Butler to be subordinate to Fraser on grounds of military protocol – a brigadier should not take orders from another brigadier. Instead, he occupied a place outside the architecture of command. He took his orders directly from the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood and had political oversight of the operation. Butler had a rich array of talents and accomplishments which marked him for high command. He glowed with the special confidence that an Eton education seems to bestow. He was clever and looked beyond the obvious. In his opinion, the instability in Helmand was not a simple matter of the Taliban and al-Qaeda stirring up trouble. It had deeper causes, rooted in tribal dynamics and the struggle for resources.
Butler was unhappy with the command arrangements. In an attempt to overcome the difficulties of the set-up, a subordinate layer of command was inserted into the hierarchy. Colonel Charlie Knaggs, who had recently commanded the Irish Guards, was put in charge of the Helmand Task Force, and was therefore in nominal tactical command of every British soldier in the province. This appointment only added to the confusion. Finally, the Americans engaged in the counter-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan also had a formal interest in British operations. They were commanded by Major General Ben Freakley, a God-fearing, fighting soldier who rejected any idea of compromise with the Taliban and came to distrust the British approach.
Thus, for the first four months of the tour, Tootal had to answer to the Canadians, the Americans and also to Charlie Knaggs. Ed Butler was on hand to advise and listen to his concerns, but he operated at a tangent to the decision-making process. One of David Richards’s first acts on taking over full command of ISAF in August was to place Butler below Fraser and give him tactical responsibility for British forces under Canadian command. It seemed obvious to many that this was what should have been done at the outset. The structure was extraordinarily cumbersome and guaranteed to generate fuzziness and ambiguity. This was before account was taken of Afghanistan’s swirling political complexities. These difficulties would play an important part in the Para battle group’s destiny in Helmand.
Despite the limitations on their hearts-and-minds activities, the Paras did what they could. On 1 June, to mark the United Nations’ National Children’s Day, ‘C’ Company, which had just taken over from ‘A’ Company in Gereshk, went to a local school and, with the approval of local elders, suggested a game of football. They handed out kit and, according to their OC, Major Paul Blair, were surprised when ‘less than ten minutes later the local team ran out wearing the strip. A lot of them were playing in bare feet but we were royally thrashed.’
Even at this stage, Blair believed the outreach mission could work.
Little things amazed me – the discipline of the children when we were playing football – one word from the teacher and they sat cross-legged around the pitch. Lots of the older students came out and said, ‘This is amazing’