No Worse Enemy Read Online Free Page B

was often enough to scare the Taliban into retreating.
    Everyone was ordered to start moving back, believing that eighteen Taliban had been killed, mostly by the air strike. Lance Corporal Jack Mizon and Lance Sergeant Jason McDonald, who had charged
forwards with the ANA, re-appeared, soaked in sweat and bouncing with adrenaline. ‘It was a bit too close with the RPGs whizzing over the wall’, said McDonald, with a humble,
gap-toothed smile. The ANA also re-appeared, some sprinting in all directions and others standing still, in plain sight of the remaining enemy fighters who had tried to flank us. ‘Get them
shaken out into a defensive posture, get a grip of these fucking idiots’, screamed Major Martin David.
    ‘One of them was stood up’, said McDonald, ‘when there was RPGs winging straight over our heads. I was on my belt buckle and he was stood up, eating an apple and laughing at
us.’
    ‘Very good soldier, my soldier very good’, said the ANA’s commanding officer, almost singing with laughter as we pulled back. I hadn’t seen him since, on the way in,
he’d made one of his soldiers carry him over a stream so that he didn’t get his boots wet.
    When we got back to the patrol base, the ANA found the Taliban’s frequency on their radios and listened to them talk (this is called ‘i-comm chatter’). Anyone with a normal CB
radio could listen in as they were doing. I heard such ridiculous things – four hundred fighters are about to storm the base! We have taken forty casualties in the ditch! Thirty suicide
bombers are about to detonate themselves! – that I assumed the Taliban knew they were being listened to and were being deliberately misleading. But i-comm chatter was treated as if it were
the most sophisticated covert surveillance, so secret and so valuable that if I ever mentioned it I’d be aiding the enemy. The ANA either hadn’t got that message or were ignoring it, as
they immediately started talking back, taunting the Taliban about the battle they had just lost.
    ‘Come back to the same place tomorrow without the planes and helicopters and we’ll show you a fight!’ replied the Taliban.
    ‘We’ll kick your ass the same way’, said one ANA soldier, causing the others to roar with laughter. ‘And fuck your mother.’
    The Brits weren’t so jubilant. They carried the heavy equipment back to the base. They knew that the ground they’d just cleared would have to be fought for again.
    *  *  *  *  *
    The fighting in Zumbelay was part of an effort to expand a relatively secure area, optimistically designated the ‘Afghan Development Zone’. It formed a triangle
between Gereshk, Lashkar Gar (the provincial capital), and Camp Bastion, the huge and rapidly-expanding British base, complete with landing strip, safely positioned in the Helmand desert. As part
of a wider policy, the ‘comprehensive approach’, this area was supposed to be the focus of an intense nation-building and reconstruction (or construction, as some soldiers were quick to
point out) effort. It was hoped this effort would quickly convince the local population that the Afghan government, with the ‘support’ (no one was allowed to say the effort was British-
or American-led) of the international community, could provide a much better way of life than the Taliban. The local people would then side with the central government and reject the Taliban,
making it impossible for them to operate. It was classic counter-insurgency, called ‘draining the swamp’, or ‘hearts and minds’ in past campaigns, although to find an
example that actually worked, you had to go back over sixty years.
    The comprehensive approach looked perfectly feasible in a PowerPoint presentation, when the beneficiaries, who weren’t consulted, were viewed as automata. When applied to an actual
society, especially one as fragmented, traumatised and complicated as Helmand’s, it rarely lasted longer than the first ten minutes