How Britain blundered into war in Helmand to please the US

When reports first started circulating in Kabul that Britain was preparing to send troops to this desert province in the Pashtun south, many people had to look up where it was. A day’s drive from the capital, none of my Afghan colleagues had ever been there. A British colonial army was defeated in the region in 1880. More than 120 years later, few officials in London knew anything about that history, or that of southern Afghanistan. Why was Britain going back?

The simple answer was a commitment made by Prime Minister Tony Blair to contribute to NATO’s expansion across the south, to bolster the Afghan government. As different provinces were divvied up between alliance members, with colonial overtones, the UK opted for Helmand. It was also about narcotics. Britain was the so-called ‘lead nation’ tackling the Afghan drugs trade, and Helmand was the lead opium-growing province. The idea was to bring in development specialists as well as soldiers, to build up the government’s capacity. But it was also about the UK’s relationship with the United States.

After their joint invasion, Britain’s occupation of southern Iraq had not gone well. Its troops had started off in 2003 patrolling in berets, their commanders confident that they could apply their experience of counter-insurgency warfare in Northern Ireland, where they spoke the language, to the sun-roasted streets of Basra, where they didn’t.

​​As local resistance in southern Iraq grew, helmets were back on and British generals felt they needed to prove to the United States that the UK could still be an effective ally. Helmand offered that opportunity.

In late 2005, I travelled there to see it for myself. I stayed at the small American base in Lashkar Gah, the low-rise provincial capital, partly because there was already an advance British team there and I was hoping to find out more about their plans. They included soldiers, diplomats and intelligence officers.

Pashtun-majority Helmand had been an important source of recruits for the Taliban in the past and it has an even longer history of tribal feuds and land disputes, exacerbated by the communist era and the civil war. But in the early 2000s, the provincial governor appointed by President Karzai was keeping a lid on these tensions.

Sher Mohammad Akhundzada was a warlord figure with a predatory reputation and a puppeteer’s command over tribal politics. His father had been governor before him; his uncle was a celebrated mujahideen commander. Sher Mohammad ran Helmand as his own fiefdom, employing patronage and violence, underwritten by government funds, but also – it was widely reported – by profits from the local drugs trade.

One afternoon, I watched as Sher Mohammad lectured a gathering of tribal elders about the evils of cultivating opium. He was going through the motions of rallying support for a Western-funded initiative to encourage farmers to grow more wheat and other legal crops instead of opium poppy. “It’s against the law and we need to stop doing this,” the governor said.

Seated under a colourful sun awning strung over the yard of Sher Mohammad’s compound, the elders looked bored. Some were dozing. One stood up to offer an old excuse for farming poppies. “Opium is not outlawed in the Qur’an,” he said. “But alcohol and prostitution are, and the government is doing nothing to stop this.” The governor smiled, but didn’t engage.

Sher Mohammad had quick, darting eyes, on constant alert. He was only in his thirties at the time.

“It’s good to see you here,” he said, unconvincingly, when I was introduced, but he talked the talk on drugs. British forces needed “to stop smuggling across the border with Pakistan,” he said. What I didn’t know then was that the Americans had searched his compound around that time and found a substantial cache of opium there – enough to make several million dollars’ worth of heroin. He later claimed it was a store of confiscated drugs that was due to be destroyed.

Privately, US officers described the governor as ‘totally corrupt’. But one said, “We need him right now.” Helmand was a backwater for the Americans then, and they were content to have him keep the peace in his own rough-handed way. The governor was no model of governance, but he wasn’t challenging Karzai’s authority.

As it geared up for its expedition to Helmand, the Blair government saw the situation through a London lens. It could not have its soldiers working with a suspected narco baron, especially as it was also supposed to be fighting the drugs trade. Sher Mohammad had picked up the signals. “Don’t say bad things about me,” he warned me after we spoke.

Locals who had heard the British were coming had their own lens, tinted by the past. “Why are the Angrez coming?” several people asked me when I visited Lashkar Gah’s main bazaar with a translator. Angrez is the Pashto word for the English. I tried to explain the goals of the British as best as I understood them, but I had no idea how my answers sounded when they were passed on in Pashto.

A few weeks after my trip to Helmand, I heard that Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, or SMA, as the British called him, had been replaced. But they did not secure the Helmand governor’s cooperation. He was left stewing with resentment and a lot of armed men he could no longer afford to pay. This meant that even before the main UK force deployed, an important segment of opinion was against them. It also created a fertile audience for the narrative that the British were invading.

Speaking a few years later, Sher Mohammad confirmed that he had subsequently encouraged his men to switch sides. “The government stopped paying for the people who supported me,” he said. “I sent 3,000 of them off to the Taliban because I could not afford to support them, but the Taliban was making payments.”

“Here, in this extraordinary piece of desert, is where the future of the world’s security is going to be played out”

As the fighting intensified, it was portrayed back in the UK as a simple bad guys vs good guys battle between a resurgent Taliban and the legitimate Afghan government. ‘Here, in this extraordinary piece of desert, is where the future of the world’s security is going to be played out,’ said Tony Blair on a visit to the main British base in Helmand.

It was a statement remarkable both for its hyperbole and its hubris. As Ed Butler, who commanded the first British deployment to Helmand later acknowledged, the Taliban were no threat to the UK or the West. Blair could hardly admit that his own government’s decisions had helped stoke local violence.

Instead of a fight for the world’s future, Britain had stumbled into a regional civil war that it didn’t understand. That was the conclusion of Mike Martin, a former British officer who served in Helmand and learned good Pashto, allowing him to dissect the intricacies of its parochial power struggles. He saw first-hand how Britain’s local allies were manipulating their ignorance.

While some of Sher Mohammad’s men took up arms against British troops, others were part of UK-supported police forces who often used their position to muscle in on rivals’ drugs income. So-called local ‘Taliban’ turned out to be militias created by villages “to keep the [British-backed] district ‘police’ out,” said Martin.

British soldiers had to work with ‘police officers’ credibly accused of raping children. Having blacklisted Sher Mohammad, the British ended up cooperating with people with far worse records.

Some British funds went into building up government capacity, but far more went into smashing up Helmand villages with air strikes and artillery, claiming the lives of an untold number of Afghans in the process.

Two years into the campaign, around 140 British personnel had died, with the worst casualties still to come as rein- forcements were sent in. Among the new troops was a young second lieutenant called Harry Wales, better known as Prince Harry.

Having initially resisted British pressure to dismiss the Helmand governor, President Karzai was furious at the disaster that had ensued. “We removed Akhundzada [the governor] on the allegation of drug running and delivered the province to drug runners, the Taliban, to terrorists, to a threefold increase of drugs and poppy cultivation,” he told a gathering of Afghan parliamentarians in 2008.

By then, Sher Mohammad was one as well, as Karzai had made him a senator in the upper house. He couldn’t resist gloating. “When I was governor of Helmand for four years, NATO did not drop a single bomb on the province. No civilians were killed and no districts fell to the Taliban,” he said. “If I were still there, I am sure things would be the same as before.”

Helmand may not have started as a battle between the British army and the Taliban, but it ended as one. Ultimately the Taliban could claim success in sending the ‘Angrez’ back home defeated. They had won the fourth Anglo-Afghan War.

*This is an edited excerpt of Andrew North’s new book War & Peace & War: Twenty Years in Afghanistan, published by Ithaka Press.

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