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This programme contains very strong language | 0:00:02 | 0:00:09 | |
We was massively stretched at the time. | 0:00:09 | 0:00:12 | |
Massively hard pushed. | 0:00:12 | 0:00:15 | |
We were meeting force for force, small arms, rockets. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:22 | |
BULLETS RICOCHET | 0:00:27 | 0:00:29 | |
He knew he was dying. | 0:00:29 | 0:00:31 | |
He's one of the bravest blokes I've ever had the pleasure of working with. | 0:00:31 | 0:00:36 | |
We'd hit them again and again and again. | 0:00:36 | 0:00:38 | |
We killed 24 guys that day. | 0:00:38 | 0:00:42 | |
The battle for Helmand has cost thousands of Afghan | 0:00:42 | 0:00:45 | |
and hundreds of British lives. | 0:00:45 | 0:00:48 | |
There are ghosts of them all over the place. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:57 | |
You never really forget them. You can't possibly forget them. | 0:00:57 | 0:01:00 | |
I don't think a day goes by when I don't think of them. | 0:01:00 | 0:01:03 | |
We've just had some incoming fire from that side... | 0:01:03 | 0:01:07 | |
'I've been reporting from Afghanistan for more than 20 years. | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
'In this film, I'm going to look behind the headlines | 0:01:10 | 0:01:13 | |
'of Britain's bloody five-year campaign in Helmand.' | 0:01:13 | 0:01:17 | |
But did it really have to be this tough? | 0:01:17 | 0:01:20 | |
Were the objectives set by the generals and politicians realistic? | 0:01:20 | 0:01:25 | |
The gap between policy-making and its subsequent implementation was far too wide. | 0:01:29 | 0:01:35 | |
We've muddled through. | 0:01:35 | 0:01:38 | |
This is the story of how Britain "muddled" from one plan to another. | 0:01:38 | 0:01:45 | |
Yes, it was a stretch, a risk. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:47 | |
But we're paratroopers, we're British soldiers, that's what we do. | 0:01:47 | 0:01:50 | |
The story of how the nation was not prepared to pay the price for success. | 0:01:50 | 0:01:57 | |
Shit! | 0:01:57 | 0:01:58 | |
I asked on a daily, weekly, basis for more troops, more helicopters. | 0:01:58 | 0:02:03 | |
We could not cede pieces of ground to the insurgent the way we had done there. | 0:02:03 | 0:02:11 | |
The British force in Helmand was under-resourced. | 0:02:11 | 0:02:14 | |
But most of all, it's the story of those | 0:02:14 | 0:02:17 | |
who had to face the consequences of a war | 0:02:17 | 0:02:21 | |
that others had not thought through. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:24 | |
Roughly a hundred men holding a defensive position | 0:02:24 | 0:02:29 | |
in the most hostile town, in the most hostile country in the world. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:36 | |
We came in via Chinooks with some intense manoeuvring, which was quite good. | 0:02:53 | 0:02:58 | |
We de-bussed off the Chinook and it was then we came under contact. | 0:03:06 | 0:03:10 | |
RAPID GUNFURE | 0:03:10 | 0:03:12 | |
Helmand - the summer of 2006. | 0:03:17 | 0:03:21 | |
16 Air Assault Brigade is in action. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:28 | |
The intensity of the fighting took us by surprise, | 0:03:28 | 0:03:30 | |
not least because the intelligence told us | 0:03:30 | 0:03:33 | |
there wouldn't be Taliban when we arrived. | 0:03:33 | 0:03:35 | |
We took a major weight of fire. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:41 | |
Being my first experience, I thought it was a lot of fire! | 0:03:41 | 0:03:46 | |
They were throwing grenades over the wall, which were landing within metres of us. | 0:03:46 | 0:03:51 | |
It was an absolute miracle not one of us even got hit. | 0:03:56 | 0:03:59 | |
Heavy firepower was often needed to support the troops. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:03 | |
-Fucking hell! -Fucking hell, boys! -RPG! | 0:04:05 | 0:04:09 | |
We was in a compound with a small archway, | 0:04:09 | 0:04:12 | |
which was no more than three feet high, | 0:04:12 | 0:04:14 | |
and now there was fire coming through the archway. | 0:04:14 | 0:04:18 | |
We were sending fire back through. | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
At my command! | 0:04:20 | 0:04:22 | |
The commander said, "If you haven't got a wife or children, follow me." | 0:04:22 | 0:04:27 | |
Looking back, it's just a funny thing. | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
To move a step further would have been suicidal. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:34 | |
We literally dived on the floor and crawled back through the hole. | 0:04:34 | 0:04:40 | |
They usually found themselves overstretched and outnumbered. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:46 | |
We didn't want to retreat, so we just...we carried on fighting. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:50 | |
And in the end, a couple of Apaches came and an A10 Thunderbolt. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:55 | |
INDISTINCT SPEECH | 0:04:55 | 0:04:56 | |
That pretty much obliterated what was left of the enemy | 0:05:00 | 0:05:03 | |
and now we were able, in the end, to withdraw | 0:05:03 | 0:05:06 | |
in absolute silence, under no enemy contact. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:11 | |
The primary mission was meant to be reconstruction. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:19 | |
So how did Britain end up at war? | 0:05:22 | 0:05:24 | |
INDISTINCT | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
Things looked very different when going to Afghanistan was first considered. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:33 | |
If you look at the situation at the end of 2004, | 0:05:33 | 0:05:35 | |
when the decision to deploy south-east was taken, | 0:05:35 | 0:05:38 | |
things were pretty good. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:40 | |
There was virtually no violence in Helmand. | 0:05:40 | 0:05:43 | |
By then, Britain had been at war in Iraq for more than 18 months. | 0:05:45 | 0:05:48 | |
The public didn't like it. | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
And when the government suggested sending even more troops to Iraq, | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
the generals pushed their own alternative. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:59 | |
What I can say, | 0:05:59 | 0:06:01 | |
remembering conversations with those people at the time, | 0:06:01 | 0:06:04 | |
is that they defined this mission in opposition to Iraq. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:10 | |
They saw this place, by contrast, as a chance to involve those forces | 0:06:10 | 0:06:16 | |
in a different, new and exciting mission. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
The generals got their way. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:25 | |
The British Government announced a mission to develop Helmand, | 0:06:25 | 0:06:29 | |
saying it would only fight if it absolutely had to. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:33 | |
We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years' time | 0:06:35 | 0:06:38 | |
without firing one shot, | 0:06:38 | 0:06:41 | |
because our mission is to protect the reconstruction. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:45 | |
In one of the poorest parts of the world, | 0:06:47 | 0:06:51 | |
people could certainly use the help, | 0:06:51 | 0:06:53 | |
and it was hoped the Afghans would welcome it. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:57 | |
I think there was a naivety on a sort of corporate level | 0:06:59 | 0:07:03 | |
that people felt we were going to go into Afghanistan | 0:07:03 | 0:07:06 | |
and hand out bread and milk | 0:07:06 | 0:07:07 | |
and deliver development and reconstruction. | 0:07:07 | 0:07:10 | |
Brigadier Butler had already commanded the Special Air Service in Afghanistan | 0:07:10 | 0:07:16 | |
and would now lead the 1st Brigade into Helmand. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
He points to intelligence failures. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:24 | |
I think in some ways there was simply insufficient information | 0:07:24 | 0:07:28 | |
to develop a long-term strategy for Afghanistan | 0:07:28 | 0:07:31 | |
based on the knowledge which we had in 2005. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:34 | |
Helmand Province. | 0:07:39 | 0:07:41 | |
23,000 square miles of mountains, desert and farmland. | 0:07:41 | 0:07:46 | |
It's half the size of England. | 0:07:46 | 0:07:49 | |
The province was well known only for opium poppies, | 0:07:54 | 0:07:58 | |
supplying 40% of the world's heroin. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:01 | |
There was a whole series of people who just simply did not want us there. | 0:08:03 | 0:08:07 | |
The warlords from the former regime, | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
the narco criminals who were making hundreds of millions of pounds | 0:08:10 | 0:08:14 | |
out of the opiate industry, and then the Taliban themselves. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
So those three very powerful groups were always going to react to our presence. | 0:08:17 | 0:08:24 | |
So in April 2006 the initial elements of 16 Air Assault Brigade | 0:08:25 | 0:08:31 | |
began arriving here at Camp Tombstone, | 0:08:31 | 0:08:34 | |
which at the time was a rather lonely outpost of the US Special Forces | 0:08:34 | 0:08:39 | |
in the desert in Helmand Province. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:41 | |
For the first couple of months we were patrolling in soft hats | 0:08:41 | 0:08:45 | |
a fairly sort of unaggressive posture | 0:08:45 | 0:08:47 | |
and the real aim was just to get in to the local town and the surrounding areas, | 0:08:47 | 0:08:52 | |
speak to the locals and identify tasks that could be fulfilled by aid agencies, NGO's for reconstruction. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:58 | |
Of the nearly 3,800 personnel first sent, | 0:09:00 | 0:09:04 | |
the majority were engineers and support troops. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:07 | |
They were there to build the Camp Bastion base | 0:09:07 | 0:09:11 | |
and develop the main centres, Lashkar Gar and Gereshk. | 0:09:11 | 0:09:16 | |
Only about a quarter of the people who went out on that initial deployment | 0:09:16 | 0:09:21 | |
were the three Para Battle Group, the combat infantry | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
but very soon after they got here | 0:09:24 | 0:09:27 | |
they realised they were walking into a maelstrom. | 0:09:27 | 0:09:30 | |
The trouble started in the northern valleys, | 0:09:32 | 0:09:35 | |
volatile opium country | 0:09:35 | 0:09:37 | |
where armed groups of the drug lords, insurgents | 0:09:37 | 0:09:41 | |
and tribesmen went on the offensive. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
These attacks in Now Zad, Mushakala and Sangin | 0:09:44 | 0:09:49 | |
were challenging our very authority and reason for being there. | 0:09:49 | 0:09:53 | |
The Paras started to fight back. | 0:09:55 | 0:09:57 | |
But that exposed the reality that Butler faced competing missions | 0:09:57 | 0:10:02 | |
fighting the insurgents versus bolstering the Afghan Government through good deeds. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:08 | |
By mid-June the crisis had focused at a place where opium trading, | 0:10:20 | 0:10:26 | |
insurgency, and hatred of outsiders | 0:10:26 | 0:10:29 | |
came together in their most violent form. | 0:10:29 | 0:10:32 | |
The northern district, Sangin. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:37 | |
Tribesmen killed dozens of the district governor's supporters and the police. | 0:10:40 | 0:10:45 | |
And so Helmand's Governor demanded the British do something. | 0:10:47 | 0:10:52 | |
Their mission was to maintain security in Helmand. | 0:10:52 | 0:10:56 | |
if they were not deploying their troops to those districts | 0:10:56 | 0:11:01 | |
to the north we may lost those districts. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:06 | |
Both he and President Karzai said if you're not prepared to fight | 0:11:06 | 0:11:10 | |
and if you're not prepared to protect our flag | 0:11:10 | 0:11:13 | |
and protect our people, why are you here? | 0:11:13 | 0:11:15 | |
The British now faced a critical decision. | 0:11:16 | 0:11:20 | |
keeping the Afghan government flag flying | 0:11:20 | 0:11:23 | |
meant defending Sangin with British troops. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:28 | |
Everyone was involved, from me to my brigade commander, | 0:11:28 | 0:11:33 | |
to especially the Afghan Governor at the time | 0:11:33 | 0:11:37 | |
and certainly the UK government. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
Implementing the decision to act rested with Colonel Tootal. | 0:11:40 | 0:11:44 | |
Although we never really had the resources to do it in the way that I would have wanted to, | 0:11:47 | 0:11:51 | |
then the logic was sound and we'd been asked to do something. | 0:11:51 | 0:11:55 | |
After 20 minutes of deliberation, he agreed to do it. | 0:11:55 | 0:12:00 | |
Yes, it was a stretch, yes, it was a risk, | 0:12:00 | 0:12:03 | |
but, we're paratroopers, we're British soldiers, that's what we do, | 0:12:03 | 0:12:06 | |
and that's exactly what we did. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:08 | |
They were equipped only for a brief mission north. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
Our kit was packed for exactly that - three to four days. | 0:12:14 | 0:12:18 | |
Really, really minimal stuff. | 0:12:18 | 0:12:22 | |
As soon as they arrived they tried to fortify the local government HQ or District Centre. | 0:12:22 | 0:12:27 | |
We were filling cardboard boxes with rubble and building up defences | 0:12:28 | 0:12:33 | |
just basically out of anything you could. | 0:12:33 | 0:12:35 | |
Filling up 24-hour ration boxes. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:37 | |
we just made do with what was there, which wasn't a lot. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:40 | |
-What do you want us firing into? -Same place, mate! | 0:12:48 | 0:12:51 | |
It started off maybe | 0:12:51 | 0:12:53 | |
a couple of times a day and then it sort of increased to, | 0:12:53 | 0:12:57 | |
you know, seven, eight times a day into the night as well. | 0:12:57 | 0:13:00 | |
It was just constant contacts of three, four, five times a day | 0:13:05 | 0:13:09 | |
they were trying to hit us either by small arms, rockets or mortars. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:14 | |
We had a couple of times when we they had actually tried to storm the place. | 0:13:14 | 0:13:19 | |
They had the idea that they were going to try and take the camp, | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
which was never going to happen. | 0:13:24 | 0:13:26 | |
It was pretty much a shootout. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:29 | |
So they learnt a harsh lesson that night. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:31 | |
We were meeting force with force. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:34 | |
So if they come at us with small arms, rockets, whatever, | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
we'll meet them with that. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:39 | |
But we're better. | 0:13:41 | 0:13:42 | |
They fired a rocket, killing a couple of guys from the signals unit. | 0:13:48 | 0:13:52 | |
And an Afghan interpreter. | 0:13:54 | 0:13:56 | |
These were the first casualties. It sort of hit home to everyone | 0:13:56 | 0:14:00 | |
you know this isn't a joke, this is real. | 0:14:00 | 0:14:03 | |
They were cut off in the Sangin District Centre. | 0:14:06 | 0:14:10 | |
There's a building. A double door, red door. | 0:14:10 | 0:14:13 | |
To the left of that you've got an open doorway. In there. | 0:14:13 | 0:14:17 | |
The deal was that we would go there for 96 hours. | 0:14:17 | 0:14:21 | |
We actually spent a total of 95 days there fighting every day. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:25 | |
Being besieged in Sangin was bad enough. | 0:14:25 | 0:14:29 | |
but Colonel Tootal's remaining combat troops | 0:14:29 | 0:14:31 | |
were also sent to garrison other northern centres - | 0:14:31 | 0:14:36 | |
Now Zad and Musa Qala. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:39 | |
Having established what were soon called Platoon Houses | 0:14:45 | 0:14:49 | |
across a broad expanse of the province, | 0:14:49 | 0:14:52 | |
the British realised how hard it would be to defend them all. | 0:14:52 | 0:14:56 | |
We were pretty much surrounded by the Taliban at the time | 0:14:56 | 0:15:00 | |
we was running low on food and water. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:03 | |
So we pretty much had to ration everything - including ammunition. | 0:15:03 | 0:15:07 | |
Each of these bases had just a few score Paras, Royal Irish Rangers or Ghurkhas. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:16 | |
As they fought off attacks day and night. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
this struggle obliterated the bigger picture. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:23 | |
Leave it there, get the missile! | 0:15:23 | 0:15:27 | |
We didn't appreciate that they would focus around the district centres. | 0:15:27 | 0:15:31 | |
They were acting as breakwaters. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:33 | |
Reacting to a series of crises had become a strategy. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:40 | |
So what happened in many of these places was that | 0:15:40 | 0:15:43 | |
only a very small area could come under the influence of the troops | 0:15:43 | 0:15:47 | |
that were up here, while all around them, the insurgents moved. | 0:15:47 | 0:15:52 | |
The soldiers nicknamed their enemy Terry Taliban. | 0:15:54 | 0:15:58 | |
But they faced a mixture of gunmen hired by the drug lords, | 0:15:58 | 0:16:02 | |
hardcore jihadists and local farmers. | 0:16:02 | 0:16:07 | |
The regular Taliban were employing | 0:16:07 | 0:16:09 | |
what we termed as the ten dollar Taliban. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:11 | |
They pay them ten dollars, give them a weapon to come and hit us with | 0:16:11 | 0:16:15 | |
and I think a lot of them were on drugs as well | 0:16:15 | 0:16:18 | |
cos when they did get hit a lot of them didn't fall. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:20 | |
They just kept firing. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:21 | |
We poked the hornet's nest and they came out biting. | 0:16:21 | 0:16:25 | |
We didn't have enough people on the ground. | 0:16:25 | 0:16:27 | |
We was massively stretched at the time. | 0:16:27 | 0:16:30 | |
There was one battle group to pretty much cover the whole of Helmand. | 0:16:30 | 0:16:35 | |
I asked on a daily, weekly basis | 0:16:35 | 0:16:37 | |
for more troops, more capability, more helicopters. | 0:16:37 | 0:16:42 | |
I remember saying to the Chief of Defence Staff in 2006 on one of | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
his visits that we needed probably a division size - | 0:16:45 | 0:16:49 | |
10,000 troops to achieve what we'd set out to do. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:53 | |
We increased the size of our deployed forces in Afghanistan | 0:16:53 | 0:16:56 | |
as rapidly as we could given the fact that we were trying to balance | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
Afghanistan, Iraq and the overall pressure on the British military. | 0:17:00 | 0:17:04 | |
Some small scale reinforcements were sent, | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
but they were trying to hold an area half the size of England | 0:17:10 | 0:17:15 | |
with little over 1,000 combat soldiers. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:19 | |
Now you've got some 30,000 NATO troops | 0:17:19 | 0:17:23 | |
holding a roughly similar area, | 0:17:23 | 0:17:25 | |
but it shows the scarcity of resources | 0:17:25 | 0:17:28 | |
and the stretch that we faced, that we held that ground with about 1,200 men. | 0:17:28 | 0:17:34 | |
Horribly outnumbered, they could only hold on | 0:17:51 | 0:17:54 | |
by calling in air power and artillery. | 0:17:54 | 0:17:58 | |
The insurgents needled the British | 0:17:58 | 0:18:01 | |
into laying waste to areas they'd been sent to protect. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:05 | |
We acknowledged that there was more destruction than construction | 0:18:09 | 0:18:13 | |
going on in the places we were trying to help. | 0:18:13 | 0:18:15 | |
build and bring security in governance. | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
Some of his men even question what good it all did. | 0:18:20 | 0:18:24 | |
Ah, fucking zero. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:27 | |
Zero. | 0:18:27 | 0:18:28 | |
We demonstrated to the insurgents that we weren't going to take | 0:18:28 | 0:18:31 | |
a beating. We certainly weren't going to withdraw from that area. | 0:18:31 | 0:18:35 | |
but in terms of bringing bringing reconstruction and development to the area, | 0:18:35 | 0:18:41 | |
clearly not a huge amount was achieved, | 0:18:41 | 0:18:43 | |
simply because of the efforts of the insurgents to thwart that. | 0:18:43 | 0:18:48 | |
The Kajaki Dam and power plant was one of the most important places in Helmand. | 0:18:50 | 0:18:55 | |
It was here that deep flaws in Britain's operation would be exposed. | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
Despite its value, | 0:19:03 | 0:19:05 | |
Colonel Tootal only had a few dozen men to secure the dam. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:09 | |
On the morning of September 6th they launched an operation. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:16 | |
The idea was to send out a sniper team to intercept | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
some insurgents who were manning an illegal check point | 0:19:24 | 0:19:27 | |
and they came down the slope and through the valley there down below. | 0:19:27 | 0:19:32 | |
I heard the explosion, I mean... | 0:19:35 | 0:19:37 | |
..so I knew, I knew straightaway that that was a mine. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:42 | |
Sgt Pearson's team had wandered into an old Russian minefield, | 0:19:44 | 0:19:49 | |
and he went to rescue them in the minefield. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:53 | |
Almost as soon as the incident had started, | 0:19:55 | 0:19:57 | |
the troops on the ground quite rightly identified | 0:19:57 | 0:20:00 | |
the need for a winch-equipped Black Hawk helicopter. | 0:20:00 | 0:20:04 | |
However we were then told that wasn't available. | 0:20:04 | 0:20:07 | |
The British didn't have any in the inventory. | 0:20:07 | 0:20:10 | |
Took my foot, slipped off, whatever, off a rock and | 0:20:10 | 0:20:14 | |
put it in the sand and stood straight on a mine. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:18 | |
and my left leg was gone straight away. I knew exactly what I'd done | 0:20:18 | 0:20:24 | |
and I got blown up a bit, spun round, | 0:20:24 | 0:20:28 | |
landed and lifted my leg to see what was gone, | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
and see that was gone at roughly boot height, | 0:20:31 | 0:20:33 | |
cos my top lace was still attached to my leg - | 0:20:33 | 0:20:36 | |
Well, the remainder of my leg. | 0:20:36 | 0:20:38 | |
A third mine detonated just beside myself | 0:20:38 | 0:20:42 | |
and Mark Wright caught a lot of that. | 0:20:42 | 0:20:45 | |
Mark would keep moral up - he'd be shouting at us | 0:20:47 | 0:20:50 | |
and then we'd be having a laugh and a joke, and one of the lads, | 0:20:50 | 0:20:54 | |
Dave Prosser, it turned out it was his birthday, | 0:20:54 | 0:20:57 | |
so we managed to sing Happy Birthday for him. | 0:20:57 | 0:21:00 | |
But while the search for a suitable helicopter went on, | 0:21:00 | 0:21:04 | |
men were bleeding to death. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:06 | |
Eventually we got the two Black Hawk helicopters. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:10 | |
Three, almost three-and-a-half hours after we'd asked for them. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:14 | |
And did exactly what we needed them to do, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:17 | |
they air lifted the casualties out by winching some very brave American paramedics into the minefield. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:23 | |
And then Mark shouted to me, | 0:21:23 | 0:21:25 | |
"If I die, tell Gillian, my uncle, my family that I love them." | 0:21:25 | 0:21:28 | |
And I just shouted back, "Shut up Mark, | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
"this time next week we're going to be back in the pub!" | 0:21:31 | 0:21:34 | |
Cos you don't want to hear something like that. | 0:21:34 | 0:21:37 | |
When I eventually got winched up, it was after Mark, | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
and I looked beside me and Mark was there and I was like, | 0:21:40 | 0:21:45 | |
thank Christ that's over. | 0:21:45 | 0:21:47 | |
Mark Wright died of his wounds on the way to Bastion. | 0:21:47 | 0:21:51 | |
He's definitely one of the, if not THE bravest bloke I've ever had the pleasure of working with. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:59 | |
The one thing that was the most emotional thing in a very emotional tour, | 0:21:59 | 0:22:03 | |
that stood out for me was as we filed out of the make-shift chaplain tent, | 0:22:03 | 0:22:08 | |
Mark's best friend, Corporal Lee Parker, stopped and ruffled his hair. | 0:22:08 | 0:22:13 | |
We always rip each other. My best mate, Peter he came to visit me. | 0:22:13 | 0:22:18 | |
I'd just been moved out of intensive care, | 0:22:18 | 0:22:21 | |
he visited me, gave me a parrot and an eye-patch | 0:22:21 | 0:22:24 | |
and a copy of Runners Weekly which I thought was a touch. | 0:22:24 | 0:22:29 | |
Later that evening, attacks on Sangin and then Musa Qala led to even more casualties. | 0:22:31 | 0:22:37 | |
Their only hope of survival was evacuation by helicopter. | 0:22:37 | 0:22:42 | |
But every time they went in to pick up the wounded | 0:22:47 | 0:22:50 | |
they ran the very real risk of being shot down. | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
During that day the Para Battle Group lost three soldiers killed | 0:23:06 | 0:23:11 | |
and suffered 18 wounded. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:14 | |
But because of what they went through that day, | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
commanders increasingly asked themselves about whether | 0:23:17 | 0:23:20 | |
the risks of losing one of those helicopters, could still be run. | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
My biggest concern was losing | 0:23:24 | 0:23:28 | |
one of the very few Chinook troop carrying helicopters, | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
particularly if it had 50 or 60 soldiers as well as the crew | 0:23:31 | 0:23:35 | |
and they could have been lost in a heartbeat. | 0:23:35 | 0:23:37 | |
Losing a helicopter would put the whole Helmand operation at risk. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:47 | |
The Paras simply couldn't hold on everywhere. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:50 | |
and as is now revealed, London felt the risks in Musa Qala were too high. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:57 | |
So while in London you don't interfere with commanders on the ground, | 0:23:57 | 0:24:01 | |
in this particular case I certainly did intervene | 0:24:01 | 0:24:04 | |
and I certainly did say, you've got to get us out of Musa Qala. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:07 | |
The British made a face-saving deal. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:11 | |
they agreed to withdraw if the local leaders promised to keep the Taliban | 0:24:11 | 0:24:17 | |
out of Musa Qala. | 0:24:17 | 0:24:19 | |
The local commander was unhappy, | 0:24:19 | 0:24:21 | |
Karzai was unhappy, everybody was unhappy, save for the insurgents. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:24 | |
it was an unfortunate deal. | 0:24:24 | 0:24:28 | |
They withdrew in civilian trucks. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
They weren't armoured. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
Although we trusted the elders, we didn't trust the Taliban. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:38 | |
The guys found it quite stressful for them. | 0:24:38 | 0:24:41 | |
Some of the younger guys couldn't understand the situation. | 0:24:41 | 0:24:44 | |
We lost three people | 0:24:44 | 0:24:47 | |
and loads injured. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:49 | |
But it certainly didn't sit well with some of the guys. | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
The deal held for a few months but in February 2007 | 0:24:55 | 0:24:58 | |
the Taliban had returned and set up a shadow Helmand government in Musa Qala. | 0:24:58 | 0:25:05 | |
We could not cede pieces of ground to the insurgent the way we had done there. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:11 | |
It was a bold move to stick those platoons out | 0:25:11 | 0:25:15 | |
but it was, in retrospect, not the smartest of tactics, | 0:25:15 | 0:25:19 | |
simply because you didn't have the force to back it up. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:22 | |
But sustaining a deployment that was not | 0:25:22 | 0:25:25 | |
in the long term operational interests of the mission, | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
just because you didn't want to get a bit of egg on your face would have been insane. | 0:25:29 | 0:25:33 | |
But a chorus of armchair criticisms started too | 0:25:33 | 0:25:36 | |
and we heard some of that. | 0:25:36 | 0:25:39 | |
Had they dealt out too much destruction? | 0:25:39 | 0:25:41 | |
Had they seriously alienated the very people that Britain was trying to win over? | 0:25:41 | 0:25:47 | |
Towards the end of 2006, The Royal Marines replaced the Paras. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:57 | |
That was where the fire was coming from. | 0:25:57 | 0:26:01 | |
The Government did send 700 additional infantry and a few more helicopters. | 0:26:01 | 0:26:07 | |
Adopting their own new tactic, the commandos formed mobile groups. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:13 | |
to seek out guerrilla bands before they could attack the district centres. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:18 | |
They went where they knew the enemy were waiting. | 0:26:27 | 0:26:30 | |
a tactic they called "advancing to ambush". | 0:26:30 | 0:26:33 | |
Halfway between the large tree! | 0:26:33 | 0:26:35 | |
Many of them loved it, | 0:26:36 | 0:26:39 | |
because the Afghans would give them a stand up fight. | 0:26:39 | 0:26:42 | |
The commandos' tour finished with fresh claims of hundreds of Taliban killed. | 0:26:44 | 0:26:51 | |
It was unclear if they'd regained the initiative. | 0:26:53 | 0:26:56 | |
and their successors certainly thought they had a better solution. | 0:26:56 | 0:27:01 | |
The British used six-month tours so twice every year | 0:27:04 | 0:27:07 | |
new commanders adopted new tactics for THEIR new mission in Helmand. | 0:27:07 | 0:27:13 | |
It meant that the policy meandered around, | 0:27:15 | 0:27:18 | |
so when three Commando Brigade arrived, leaving behind their dagger, | 0:27:18 | 0:27:21 | |
they wanted to get moving again. They felt the paratroopers were | 0:27:21 | 0:27:25 | |
too fixed in those platoon houses and district centres. | 0:27:25 | 0:27:27 | |
12 Brigade then arrived and they were moving all right, up and down the province, | 0:27:27 | 0:27:32 | |
but their own commander described the effects as being like mowing the grass. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:37 | |
They'd cut down the enemy and move on | 0:27:40 | 0:27:42 | |
so the insurgents would just return, as nobody stayed to stop them. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:46 | |
Then six months later, a new brigade arrived with its own ideas and aims. | 0:27:46 | 0:27:53 | |
General McNeill, commanduing all NATO forces in Afghanistan, | 0:27:56 | 0:28:01 | |
found the year long US Army tours more effective. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:05 | |
I thought the six-months tour did not work in the favour | 0:28:06 | 0:28:11 | |
of the operational concepts and tactical concepts | 0:28:11 | 0:28:14 | |
that the British military had in Helmand. I stand by that. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
The commandos were followed by 12 Brigade, | 0:28:19 | 0:28:22 | |
among them the Queen's Company, Grenadier Guards | 0:28:22 | 0:28:26 | |
Sergeant Major Glen Snazle was filmed in 2007 | 0:28:30 | 0:28:34 | |
when they were deployed to knock the Afghan Army into shape. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:38 | |
He soon discovered some Afghan soldiers or ANA, | 0:28:38 | 0:28:43 | |
when given a gun, were more of a threat to their own side, than the enemy. | 0:28:43 | 0:28:47 | |
Going out on a morning patrol, one of the ANA soldiers | 0:28:47 | 0:28:51 | |
shot himself through the foot | 0:28:51 | 0:28:53 | |
which subsequently shot a dog | 0:28:53 | 0:28:55 | |
ricocheted off the wall and nearly shot some of our guys. | 0:28:55 | 0:28:58 | |
And that's what we were up to on a daily basis with the ANA. | 0:28:58 | 0:29:01 | |
The Grenadiers pushed the Afghan Army in the toughest classroom - combat. | 0:29:03 | 0:29:08 | |
And they adopted another new approach, | 0:29:08 | 0:29:12 | |
challenging the insurgents where most of them lived - | 0:29:12 | 0:29:15 | |
in the lush, irrigated, land, the so called "green zone". | 0:29:15 | 0:29:21 | |
When you go in the green zone there's a feeling of vulnerability. | 0:29:21 | 0:29:26 | |
There was a lot of vegetation a lot of cover from view. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
It was just a myriad of irrigation ditches | 0:29:29 | 0:29:33 | |
and a lot of compounds were dotted around the area. | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
You almost feel like the enemy have got eyes on you but you haven't got eyes on them. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:42 | |
That's enemy fire above us. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:46 | |
We came under contact. | 0:29:51 | 0:29:53 | |
It was heavy contact and it it went on through the day. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:57 | |
Two more casualties! Two more! | 0:29:57 | 0:30:00 | |
If you've never been in a contact before the first time | 0:30:00 | 0:30:03 | |
you come under contact it really is exhilarating. | 0:30:03 | 0:30:05 | |
Just the fact that you're within inches at times | 0:30:07 | 0:30:13 | |
of losing your life... | 0:30:13 | 0:30:16 | |
ertainly puts it in perspective. | 0:30:16 | 0:30:20 | |
Get out of that back blast! | 0:30:24 | 0:30:26 | |
We've got enemy in the hedge line 100 metres forward there... | 0:30:31 | 0:30:34 | |
You don't see the Taliban. They're very clever, they box clever. | 0:30:34 | 0:30:39 | |
They're hard to locate. They were very cunning. | 0:30:39 | 0:30:42 | |
We'd been in contact for about 12 hours and one of the Afghan soldiers | 0:30:44 | 0:30:48 | |
stood completely in the open. A round struck the base of his magazine. | 0:30:48 | 0:30:53 | |
..just missing him and missing the rest of the guys in the area | 0:30:56 | 0:30:59 | |
and he just looked at us and laughed. | 0:30:59 | 0:31:00 | |
We haven't got enough ammunition to fire bursts like that. | 0:31:00 | 0:31:04 | |
The ANA in the field were very different. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:06 | |
Some were very good, some were very poor, | 0:31:06 | 0:31:10 | |
some were regular drug users, some weren't. | 0:31:10 | 0:31:15 | |
We need to start bringing in new supplies of water, food and especially ammunition. | 0:31:17 | 0:31:22 | |
Get them all up and tight in on this line. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:25 | |
OK, that's the contact. | 0:31:25 | 0:31:27 | |
GUNFIRE | 0:31:30 | 0:31:32 | |
Someone's fired an RPG about 200m to our front. | 0:31:35 | 0:31:40 | |
We're a bit pinned down for the moment. | 0:31:40 | 0:31:43 | |
We kept progressing trying to clear compounds. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:46 | |
We had to bring in mortars we had to bring in artillery | 0:31:46 | 0:31:48 | |
and we bought in attack helicopters. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:51 | |
We bought in fast air as well. | 0:31:51 | 0:31:53 | |
The busiest day I've had. | 0:32:05 | 0:32:07 | |
Probably the biggest day I've had in my career since I've been in it - | 0:32:07 | 0:32:11 | |
in terms of contacts. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:13 | |
They don't know how many they've killed, | 0:32:13 | 0:32:16 | |
but joke that the insurgents almost seem to embrace death. | 0:32:16 | 0:32:20 | |
They're the kind of people that believe when they die they're going to wake up with 27 virgins. | 0:32:20 | 0:32:25 | |
You know? So how can you fight against someone like that who doesn't give a shit? | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
It's like as soon as I die I'd be going back to Tottenham, I'd run at the bullets! | 0:32:31 | 0:32:35 | |
Casualties almost become part and parcel of the operation. | 0:32:35 | 0:32:39 | |
The memories never go away and the hardest thing about it, I think, | 0:32:39 | 0:32:43 | |
is seeing subsequent troops suffering the same casualties | 0:32:43 | 0:32:47 | |
and the same statistics and loss of limbs and deaths. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:52 | |
They was on a patrol and he got shot through the neck. | 0:32:52 | 0:32:56 | |
I was looking forward to coming back but I didn't want to come back to my friend's funeral. | 0:32:56 | 0:33:02 | |
Guardsman Daryl Hickey was killed at the age of 27. | 0:33:02 | 0:33:08 | |
Britain's death toll now reached 73. | 0:33:08 | 0:33:12 | |
I've been with Icky since I joined the Queen's Company, | 0:33:14 | 0:33:18 | |
4½ years ago but he always helped us... | 0:33:18 | 0:33:22 | |
He was a really nice person, got on well. It's not going to be nice going home without him. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:28 | |
Throughout 2007 attempts were made to get back on the front foot, | 0:33:33 | 0:33:38 | |
to take the war to the enemy. | 0:33:38 | 0:33:41 | |
but doing that spread the pain to more and more people. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:44 | |
Up near the Kajaki Dam, war had turned a thriving bazaar into a ghost town. | 0:33:48 | 0:33:56 | |
The people went and they've still not come back, | 0:33:56 | 0:33:58 | |
which is very hard to reconcile with the aim of waging a campaign | 0:33:58 | 0:34:04 | |
to benefit people here. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:06 | |
Official UN figures are almost certainly an underestimation | 0:34:06 | 0:34:10 | |
but even they indicate nearly 9,000 Afghan civilians have been killed nationwide since 2007, | 0:34:10 | 0:34:17 | |
the vast majority at the hands of insurgents. | 0:34:17 | 0:34:21 | |
But British forces have been responsible for some. | 0:34:25 | 0:34:29 | |
In May 2008 British mortars fired smoke to protect a patrol | 0:34:30 | 0:34:36 | |
that was about to be ambushed in the Kajaki hills. | 0:34:36 | 0:34:40 | |
A young girl called Shabia who was young, | 0:34:45 | 0:34:48 | |
seven, seven years of age, who was accidentally killed by... | 0:34:48 | 0:34:51 | |
by a mortar round which was fired, by a British mortar. | 0:34:51 | 0:34:55 | |
Um, you know it was absolutely tragic, it was not fired haphazardly | 0:34:55 | 0:34:59 | |
it was fired in defence of other British soldiers. | 0:34:59 | 0:35:02 | |
I'm still affected by it now because the last thing | 0:35:06 | 0:35:09 | |
I want anybody to think is that I'm going to come here to this country and, | 0:35:09 | 0:35:13 | |
and my legacy will be the destruction of the country or the people here. | 0:35:13 | 0:35:17 | |
It was an awful day, truly awful day. | 0:35:17 | 0:35:21 | |
The reality of what is euphemistically called "collateral damage" | 0:35:25 | 0:35:30 | |
became more and more apparent at the highest levels. | 0:35:30 | 0:35:33 | |
In Autumn 2007, Brigadier Mackay, the new British commander, arrived. | 0:35:35 | 0:35:42 | |
He was highly dubious of his predecessors' focus on bombs, bullets and bodies. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:47 | |
Killing the enemy in large numbers as satisfying as it might be | 0:35:49 | 0:35:54 | |
is not necessarily gonna allow you to win through and succeed. | 0:35:54 | 0:35:58 | |
Any focus on body count is a sort of corrupt measure of effectiveness. | 0:35:58 | 0:36:03 | |
What it really meant was putting the prime emphasis | 0:36:06 | 0:36:10 | |
on winning people over and subordinating everything you did | 0:36:10 | 0:36:14 | |
to the aim of securing and influencing the population. | 0:36:14 | 0:36:19 | |
And meeting Brigadier Mackay here in this garden in early 2008, | 0:36:19 | 0:36:25 | |
he was quite evangelical about it. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:27 | |
We were pretty clear from the outset that | 0:36:29 | 0:36:32 | |
the population was gonna be the prize and everything that we did | 0:36:32 | 0:36:35 | |
was going to be in support of that population. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:38 | |
First impressions were that we as an army | 0:36:40 | 0:36:45 | |
hadn't evolved its thinking, either intellectually or conceptually. | 0:36:45 | 0:36:51 | |
So he approached General Petraeus, author of a new US counter insurgency manual, | 0:36:51 | 0:36:57 | |
an approach credited with pulling Iraq back from the brink. | 0:36:57 | 0:37:01 | |
It was coherent it was up to date, it was full of ideas. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:07 | |
I just thought it was a very, very good document for its time | 0:37:07 | 0:37:11 | |
and so we used that as the basis for our counter insurgency doctrine. | 0:37:11 | 0:37:15 | |
The new approach put winning the population at the centre of everything. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:25 | |
But the insurgents had to be defeated before civilian lives | 0:37:25 | 0:37:29 | |
could be improved, which meant going on the offensive. | 0:37:29 | 0:37:33 | |
It was summarised as - Clear, Hold, Build. | 0:37:33 | 0:37:37 | |
For too long, the British had done just the "clear" part of that. | 0:37:37 | 0:37:42 | |
I wasn't going to be drawn into clearing | 0:37:45 | 0:37:47 | |
unless I could definitely hold | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
and I wasn't gonna clear and hold unless I could definitely build. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:53 | |
These American ideas shaped Brigadier Mackay's planning for a big operation | 0:37:53 | 0:37:58 | |
to restore British pride and re-take Musa Qala. | 0:37:58 | 0:38:03 | |
I was pretty insistent that we wouldn't... | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
bomb any part of Musa Qala, we didn't put any artillery rounds into Musa Qala. | 0:38:06 | 0:38:12 | |
Because I wanted a town that was up and running as soon as we'd got into it. | 0:38:12 | 0:38:17 | |
Brigadier Mackay deployed overwhelming force - | 0:38:20 | 0:38:23 | |
thousands of British troops secured the town, an American Airborne battalion fought their way in, | 0:38:23 | 0:38:31 | |
before allowing Afghan troops the symbolic finale. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:35 | |
Those scenes we had where, em, an Afghan Soldier climbed the tower | 0:38:35 | 0:38:41 | |
in the middle of Musa Qala to remove the Taliban flag | 0:38:41 | 0:38:44 | |
and plant the Afghan flag were hugely important. | 0:38:44 | 0:38:48 | |
Mackay's population focused tactics had worked - | 0:38:50 | 0:38:54 | |
the locals voted with their feet and returned to a town that was largely intact. | 0:38:54 | 0:39:00 | |
But the insurgent tactics evolved as well as the British ones. | 0:39:07 | 0:39:12 | |
Their weapon of choice was the deadly IED or Improvised Explosive Device - | 0:39:12 | 0:39:18 | |
a homemade bomb, often packed with shrapnel. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:22 | |
They were a constant hazard to every patrol, | 0:39:24 | 0:39:28 | |
where any suspicious hole or rock in the road might hide explosives | 0:39:28 | 0:39:33 | |
forcing a dangerous process of investigation and disposal. | 0:39:33 | 0:39:37 | |
IEDs killed 80 British troops in 2009 - | 0:39:42 | 0:39:46 | |
three-quarters of the total fatalities. | 0:39:46 | 0:39:50 | |
Sangin was IED central, accounting for half the incidents in Helmand. | 0:40:00 | 0:40:08 | |
In the summer of 2009 | 0:40:10 | 0:40:11 | |
part of the garrison was 9 Platoon, C Company 2 Rifles. | 0:40:11 | 0:40:17 | |
Corporal Jonathan Horne was the father of two children. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:24 | |
Rifleman Daniel Simpson had an eight-month old son. | 0:40:24 | 0:40:29 | |
They were joined by Riflemen James Backhouse and Joe Murphy. | 0:40:29 | 0:40:33 | |
On 10th July, they went on a dawn patrol in Sangin. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:40 | |
Once we'd headed down the alleyway I was in the back section... | 0:40:40 | 0:40:43 | |
..and I heard the dreaded sound of a large blast. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:50 | |
We're starting to see the bodies of riflemen. | 0:40:53 | 0:40:57 | |
Rifleman James Backhouse had been killed outright. | 0:40:57 | 0:41:02 | |
At this stage we also realised that we were coming under small arms fire from the enemy. | 0:41:02 | 0:41:07 | |
A secondary device went off, which was larger, and louder than the first one. | 0:41:09 | 0:41:17 | |
At this stage three more people died instantly - | 0:41:17 | 0:41:21 | |
Corporal Jonathan Horne, | 0:41:21 | 0:41:24 | |
Rifleman Daniel Simpson | 0:41:24 | 0:41:27 | |
and Rifleman Murphy. | 0:41:27 | 0:41:30 | |
We identified them through what they were wearing. | 0:41:30 | 0:41:33 | |
Rifleman William Aldridge died later of his wounds, | 0:41:33 | 0:41:37 | |
making him the fifth fatality. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:40 | |
Three other British soldiers perished within 24 hours, | 0:41:43 | 0:41:47 | |
a total of eight making it the worst day in the campaign. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:51 | |
Was Britain still trying to hold too much ground with too few soldiers? | 0:41:51 | 0:41:57 | |
And that really opened up the whole issue once more | 0:41:59 | 0:42:02 | |
about just how many troops was GB willing and able to commit to securing Helmand? | 0:42:02 | 0:42:09 | |
We had got to about the limit of our sustainable deployed force. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:13 | |
It wasn't sufficient even for Helmand let alone more widely across the south. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:17 | |
We may well have had to withdraw. We would certainly have had to take a different approach. | 0:42:17 | 0:42:22 | |
In four years of campaigning the British had more than doubled their force - | 0:42:23 | 0:42:27 | |
it was approaching ten thousand - | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
and spent billions. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:33 | |
But the governor of Helmand since 2008 feels positive results have been distinctly limited. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:40 | |
General Petraeus was the author of the counterinsurgency strategy | 0:43:11 | 0:43:14 | |
and had switched his attentions to Afghanistan. | 0:43:14 | 0:43:18 | |
Let's make no mistake about it - The Taliban had the momentum, | 0:43:18 | 0:43:22 | |
broadly speaking, in Afghanistan until probably sometime last fall. | 0:43:22 | 0:43:28 | |
The British force in Helmand was under-resourced, make no mistake | 0:43:28 | 0:43:31 | |
but I will leave that to the British leadership, | 0:43:31 | 0:43:34 | |
both military and civilian to decide how much it was under-resourced. | 0:43:34 | 0:43:37 | |
American generals decided a major reinforcement was needed in Helmand, putting the Brits in the back seat. | 0:43:40 | 0:43:47 | |
Some had been saying it for years. | 0:43:47 | 0:43:50 | |
It actually began with me. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:53 | |
I began to express to the leadership of the USA that this was an under resourced force | 0:43:53 | 0:43:58 | |
in manoeuvre forces, flying machines and intelligence. | 0:43:58 | 0:44:02 | |
That did not change until, I'd say...2010. | 0:44:02 | 0:44:08 | |
The American decision to surge was part of a broader strategy. | 0:44:13 | 0:44:18 | |
They wanted to turn back the insurgency, stand up a larger Afghan army and then leave. | 0:44:18 | 0:44:25 | |
In order to do that they were sending in many more troops, | 0:44:25 | 0:44:28 | |
20,000 in Helmand alone. | 0:44:28 | 0:44:31 | |
It would lead to a radical reorganisation on the ground. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:37 | |
What we wanted to do in Helmand was literally just clean up the battlefield geometry. | 0:44:41 | 0:44:46 | |
British forces up here, British forces here, marines over here... | 0:44:46 | 0:44:50 | |
I didn't get a sense of coherence. | 0:44:50 | 0:44:52 | |
We're going to clean it up in what I think is a much more coherent and sensible deployment of the forces. | 0:44:52 | 0:45:00 | |
For the British this meant a painful process - | 0:45:00 | 0:45:04 | |
handing over Garmsir | 0:45:04 | 0:45:06 | |
and the northern towns they had fought, bled and died to hold since 2006. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:11 | |
One place above all others symbolised that sacrifice - | 0:45:17 | 0:45:21 | |
Sangin, where 124 British troops have now given their lives. | 0:45:21 | 0:45:28 | |
No soldier likes to back away from a tough fight, no question about it. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:33 | |
There was a lot of blood and treasure invested in there | 0:45:33 | 0:45:37 | |
and I think that is why the UK forces wanted to see it through to the end. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:41 | |
But I made a decision to move UK forces from Sangin. | 0:45:41 | 0:45:45 | |
So on 22nd Sept 2010 | 0:45:45 | 0:45:50 | |
the Royal Marines handed it over to the US Marines... | 0:45:50 | 0:45:55 | |
Who went on the offensive. | 0:45:55 | 0:45:58 | |
EXPLOSIONS | 0:46:05 | 0:46:07 | |
Yeah! Sucks for you, you motherfucker! | 0:46:07 | 0:46:11 | |
It was a decision we made to take the fight to the enemy. | 0:46:11 | 0:46:14 | |
And that's why we're pressing him and pressuring him everywhere that we can. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:19 | |
They followed the new counterinsurgency tactics. | 0:46:24 | 0:46:28 | |
Stage one was the clear - removing the insurgents | 0:46:30 | 0:46:34 | |
to allow the hold and then the build | 0:46:34 | 0:46:36 | |
but the clearance phase was often violent. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:39 | |
Jesus came down and punched the earth. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:45 | |
This is life in Afghanistan. | 0:46:45 | 0:46:48 | |
This is how the US Marines dealt with Sangin's Pharmacy Road | 0:46:59 | 0:47:02 | |
where IEDs killed five British riflemen in one day. | 0:47:02 | 0:47:07 | |
That was a mosque. | 0:47:16 | 0:47:18 | |
To protect themselves from the IED threat | 0:47:25 | 0:47:28 | |
the US Marines had levelled 100 yards on either side of the Pharmacy Road. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:33 | |
The destruction of civilian property has to weighed against the threat that you're facing. | 0:47:33 | 0:47:42 | |
They are trained properly to look at all options, to consider the ones that will protect the force, | 0:47:42 | 0:47:48 | |
while at the same time, doing the least amount of damage | 0:47:48 | 0:47:51 | |
and only if that damage is absolutely military necessary. | 0:47:51 | 0:47:56 | |
What we wanted to ensure our soldiers did was first protect the population. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:05 | |
That's our core mission here, is to take care of those civilians, | 0:48:05 | 0:48:10 | |
not to do harm to them but also to protect our own forces | 0:48:10 | 0:48:14 | |
and you have to find that right balance there. | 0:48:14 | 0:48:16 | |
The Sangin handover meant all the British troops were now concentrated in the populated centre. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:24 | |
Exactly what they were meant to do in 2006. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:28 | |
Three years on, the surge meant the returning Grenadier Guards | 0:48:29 | 0:48:34 | |
could now focus more than 1,000 troops on just one district, Nad-e Ali. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:40 | |
And they tried to push out facing all sorts of difficulties | 0:48:41 | 0:48:45 | |
in this close country and establish new bases, clear roads | 0:48:45 | 0:48:50 | |
and they did it in a series of operations or pulses. | 0:48:50 | 0:48:53 | |
But before the Guards could hold and build in Nad-e Ali... | 0:48:57 | 0:49:01 | |
..they had to clear the insurgents out. | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
And that meant a fight. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:08 | |
What the fuck was that?! | 0:49:12 | 0:49:13 | |
We arrived to, quite literally, a hail of rounds coming in | 0:49:13 | 0:49:17 | |
and a lot of rounds going back out from the vehicles. | 0:49:17 | 0:49:21 | |
And the base was just like something you'd seen in training. | 0:49:21 | 0:49:24 | |
Every guy stood tall on the walls firing off every weapon system they'd pretty much got. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:30 | |
And what's your sniper call sign? | 0:49:32 | 0:49:34 | |
What's his estimation on how far he'll be able to see in the next two hours with increased visibility? | 0:49:34 | 0:49:41 | |
Captain Young led the Grenadiers' recce platoon in one of the clearance operations. | 0:49:41 | 0:49:47 | |
We'd see them pick up their weapons and from there | 0:49:47 | 0:49:51 | |
we'd watch them go to the firing point. | 0:49:51 | 0:49:54 | |
When they got to a point where we wanted to hit them and we thought it was safe | 0:49:54 | 0:49:58 | |
and that the population weren't going to have any ricochet any hazards, | 0:49:58 | 0:50:01 | |
then we kill that individual. | 0:50:01 | 0:50:03 | |
We'll identify them picking up their weapons and using snipers we'd hit them. | 0:50:03 | 0:50:08 | |
We extracted 24 hours later. | 0:50:08 | 0:50:10 | |
Though numbers are always vulgar, we killed a large number of guys that day. | 0:50:12 | 0:50:18 | |
Two commanders and we killed 24 guys. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:22 | |
But it was never numbers - it never is in Afghanistan. | 0:50:22 | 0:50:25 | |
You could kill one you could kill 1000 - it doesn't mean anything. | 0:50:25 | 0:50:28 | |
It's all about the psychological aspect, that sowing the seed | 0:50:28 | 0:50:31 | |
of doubt or fear so that they will spread stories about you. | 0:50:31 | 0:50:35 | |
Following these deadly clearance operations, | 0:50:37 | 0:50:39 | |
the Guards now had so many troops in Nad-e Ali that they could set out to hold and then build effectively. | 0:50:39 | 0:50:46 | |
Throughout 2010, a series of operations swamped the district, | 0:50:48 | 0:50:55 | |
pushing the insurgents further out but never removing them completely. | 0:50:55 | 0:51:02 | |
Get down! Get down! | 0:51:02 | 0:51:03 | |
Fucker! | 0:51:03 | 0:51:04 | |
We've stopped our call sign firing. It seems the engagement has ceased. | 0:51:10 | 0:51:15 | |
I think this will be looked on in hindsight | 0:51:15 | 0:51:18 | |
as one of the defining moves in the campaign. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:22 | |
It released a lot of the pressure | 0:51:22 | 0:51:25 | |
on Nad-e Ali because we were able to displace the insurgents. | 0:51:25 | 0:51:28 | |
Now a year later, we went to see if the forces have been able to hold the district. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:36 | |
British troops still say they're making good progress | 0:51:36 | 0:51:39 | |
in the area of central Helmand which they now control. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:44 | |
And to all intents and purposes, they are smothering the insurgency here. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:49 | |
But have they been able to build | 0:51:50 | 0:51:53 | |
and bring any real benefit to the ordinary Afghans? | 0:51:53 | 0:51:58 | |
It seems peaceful enough in the bazaar but is this normality just superficial? | 0:51:59 | 0:52:04 | |
Quite a few of the people I've greeted with as-salamu alaykum | 0:52:06 | 0:52:09 | |
have not replied to me and generally I take that as a bad sign. | 0:52:09 | 0:52:15 | |
Either they don't wish to be seen interacting with westerners | 0:52:15 | 0:52:19 | |
or they may actually be actively hostile. | 0:52:19 | 0:52:22 | |
But there are changes. | 0:52:26 | 0:52:29 | |
Two years ago, this was an army base | 0:52:29 | 0:52:32 | |
but now it's gone back to being a school. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:35 | |
While Afghan women now have a clinic to visit - | 0:52:40 | 0:52:44 | |
something unheard of under the Taliban. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:47 | |
Last year, the British government announced that its combat operations would end by 2015. | 0:52:55 | 0:53:01 | |
When the British troops leave, the areas they hold will be taken over by the Afghans. | 0:53:08 | 0:53:15 | |
We've joined this joint operation between the Royal Irish Rangers and Afghan security forces | 0:53:15 | 0:53:24 | |
as their mission continues to clear more areas. | 0:53:24 | 0:53:28 | |
Their objective - to push in to one of the last Taliban-influenced sections of Nad-e Ali. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:36 | |
This is the biggest air assault operation this battle group has conducted so far. | 0:53:37 | 0:53:41 | |
People are keen for it. They're really, really up for it. | 0:53:41 | 0:53:45 | |
We're going to start from south to north and try and clear out as much Taliban as we can from that area. | 0:53:46 | 0:53:51 | |
We're going out on an operation with hundreds of Afghan and British troops | 0:53:55 | 0:53:59 | |
to try and grow the area under their control even further. | 0:53:59 | 0:54:04 | |
British and American helicopters are used to carry the assault in. | 0:54:21 | 0:54:27 | |
Twice as many for this one operation as the British had for the whole province in 2006. | 0:54:27 | 0:54:34 | |
Flooding the area led to no resistance or casualties. | 0:54:39 | 0:54:42 | |
And if casualties are the criterion of success, this brigade returned home in April this year | 0:54:42 | 0:54:49 | |
with around half the losses of the one in Helmand the year before. | 0:54:49 | 0:54:54 | |
We're going to have a shifty round the compounds around us. | 0:54:54 | 0:54:57 | |
Can one of you please tie the dog up? And put all the women into one room? | 0:54:59 | 0:55:05 | |
Britain came here in 2006 to develop Helmand. | 0:55:13 | 0:55:18 | |
But for every pound spent on reconstruction, UK PLC has spent 12 pounds on the war. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:31 | |
Nine billion in all. | 0:55:31 | 0:55:34 | |
Having set out to tame a province half the size of England, | 0:55:34 | 0:55:38 | |
Britain's footprint has now been reduced to an area the size of Kent. | 0:55:38 | 0:55:44 | |
And for all the killing, solutions will require non-military answers to Afghan's insurgency. | 0:55:46 | 0:55:54 | |
Anybody who believes we can kill them all, | 0:55:55 | 0:55:58 | |
that's simply not going to happen. | 0:55:58 | 0:55:59 | |
What we have to do is push and kill enough of them, do enough reconstruction | 0:55:59 | 0:56:05 | |
that it ignites developmental fires within the Afghans, | 0:56:05 | 0:56:08 | |
create enough space that the Afghan army and police can develop. | 0:56:08 | 0:56:12 | |
Afghan forces will take over from the British in 2015. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:21 | |
One of the hardest things for those who've sacrificed so much in Helmand | 0:56:21 | 0:56:26 | |
is the knowledge that the judgement about whether it was all worth it, will now hinge upon the Afghans. | 0:56:26 | 0:56:33 | |
It really requires the Afghans to deliver a much better performance, | 0:56:33 | 0:56:38 | |
whether that's in policing or the way they govern these districts, | 0:56:38 | 0:56:42 | |
than they've shown at any time up to now. | 0:56:42 | 0:56:45 | |
Otherwise these gains could easily be squandered. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:48 | |
So what do those who've fought during the five years of combat, | 0:56:50 | 0:56:57 | |
when hundreds of British lives have been lost, | 0:56:57 | 0:56:59 | |
now think about the battle for Helmand? | 0:56:59 | 0:57:02 | |
I don't really see that us being out there is keeping terrorism off the streets of Britain, to be honest. | 0:57:05 | 0:57:12 | |
I think if anything it's stirring up a hornets' nest | 0:57:12 | 0:57:15 | |
and it'll actually bring terrorism to the streets of Britain. | 0:57:15 | 0:57:19 | |
The tour has had such a profound impact on me, my personality | 0:57:20 | 0:57:27 | |
because you lose close friends and a lot of guys got injured, physically and mentally. | 0:57:27 | 0:57:33 | |
A couple of times I've forgotten that I've actually lost my leg | 0:57:33 | 0:57:36 | |
but there's other days where I can't get the leg on. | 0:57:36 | 0:57:40 | |
I was just wheelchair bound. | 0:57:40 | 0:57:42 | |
So each day's different. | 0:57:42 | 0:57:44 | |
If you look at the situation on the ground today | 0:57:44 | 0:57:47 | |
compared to what it was in 2006 when I was there, | 0:57:47 | 0:57:50 | |
it's just a staggering improvement. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:53 | |
It looks to me as if we can be cautiously optimistic. | 0:57:53 | 0:57:56 | |
I do think it's worth us being there. | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 | |
Equally, I think it's worth doing it better than we do. | 0:57:59 | 0:58:04 | |
The gap between policy-making and its subsequent implementation was far too wide. | 0:58:05 | 0:58:12 | |
We've muddled through. | 0:58:12 | 0:58:14 | |
Next week, Lyse Doucet takes a journey away from the battlefield | 0:58:16 | 0:58:22 | |
to show a more surprising side of Afghanistan - the country she's grown to love. | 0:58:22 | 0:58:28 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:32 | 0:58:35 | |
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk | 0:58:35 | 0:58:38 |