Into the Viper's Nest

The First Pivotal Battle of the Afghan War

Stephen Grey

• Publisher: Zenith Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780760338971
• eBook ISBN: 9781616739874
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Recounts the dramatic three-day battle for the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala that started on 7 December 2007. With a pre-battle population of fifteen to twenty thousand, Musa Qala was the only significant town held by the Taliban at that time. Attacking against two thousand Taliban fighters, who were heavily dug in after occupying the town for more than nine months, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was spearheaded by Task Force 1 Fury: 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, of the 82nd Airborne Division.
 
For the ISAF Musa Qala  was a target of immense importance; the Taliban had to be driven out and the town secured. With months of occupation to get ready, the Taliban were prepared to stand and fight. What resulted was one of the biggest and most terrible battles of the war.

PART 1
The Rebellion

“You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.”
—U.S. Army Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr.

“That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
—Colonel Tu, his former
North Vietnamese counterpart1

1. Desert of Death

About 120 million years ago, a small tectonic plate was driven out of the Indian Ocean and crashed up into the Asiatic landmass. As the plate was compressed, it began to crumple up in front, throwing up to the north the hostile terrain of the central mountains of Afghanistan. More recently, a mere 40 million years back, the Indian tectonic plate came smashing in behind, throwing up another range of mountains to the west and south, a wilderness of almost impassable peaks and troughs in what is now western Pakistan and Baluchistan. In between these mountain ranges was left a vast inland basin and a single river that drained all its rainfall: the Helmand River.

The climate in this land-locked basin has fluctuated over the millennia. In some eras, the snow that fell on the mountains of Afghanistan was plentiful, and the melt waters that flowed down into the Helmand basin cut deep valleys through the mountain rock and left layer upon layer of sand and gravel in the land beneath. In arid times—as in the modern day—the snow and rainfall became pitiful, and only the tall canyons in the plateaus to the north preserved the memory of the once plentiful water. Rivers still trickled through them, but most became seasonal: dry-river courses, known to many Westerners as wadis and to Afghans as nalas or mandahs, that occasionally burst into life when sudden mountain storms sent torrents of water tumbling down them, sometimes with no warning. The desert came to be called the Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death.

The Helmand River itself, though, continued flowing through the desert, whatever the season, the only permanent desert watercourse between the Indus River in Pakistan to the east and the Tigris-Euphrates in Iraq to the west. Unlike those two other great rivers, the Helmand’s waters were trapped between two ranges of mountains and did not reach the sea. After flowing southward for hundreds of miles, the river snaked round to the southwest and settled and evaporated, as it still does today, in great shallow lakes in the desert.

For humans who settled in the basin, the constant waters of the Helmand became the source of life. Agriculture, fed by irrigation, sprang up along its banks. Some of the wadis that fed into the Helmand became sparsely settled too, exploiting the alluvial soils. At the mountains’ edge, the ancients began building underground tunnels, or karezes, to tap into the aquifers and underground rivers that still flowed freely beneath the dry surface sands. Access to these water flows and the scarce land into which they fed became the key to power and survival in this desert. And so it also became the source of conflict and war between the tribes that came to occupy these lands.

For wider humanity, the river had a greater strategic importance. As a gap between two hostile mountain ranges, the Helmand basin became—as it has remained for centuries—a great land corridor between East and West, a route for traders between Persia and India. The taxing, robbing, or protecting of trade became the other great source of income for local dwellers in this land. It was also a route of conquest: for invaders from Alexander the Great in 329 BC to the hordes of Genghis Khan in 1226, to Tamerlane (or Timur the Lame) in 1383, to the Soviet Army in 1979.1

Along this strategic route there were few natural barriers to hold back an invading army except the waters of the Helmand itself. Forts sprang up along the River Helmand’s banks. The Sultan Mahmood of Ghazni built the city of Bost in the tenth century,2 close to the present capital of Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah. It was later destroyed by Genghis Khan. Later still, the capital of what became the modern Afghan Empire was established to the east of the Helmand in a place called Kandahar, just north of the Bolan Pass through to what was then India. The Helmand Valley became, as it is today, both the gateway to and a line of defense for this great city.

But, though protected by forts against advancing armies, the Helmand River itself was never much of a barrier. There were too many easy places to ford. In 1880, during the second Afghan War, the British discovered this to their cost. A British force advanced to Gereshk, the town that controlled the bridge on the great trunk road from Herat, on the Persian border, to Kandahar. Their enemy was a pretender to the Afghan throne, Ayub Khan, who advanced with his army from Herat. Rather than confront the British at Gereshk, he swung up and crossed the river at Heyderabad further north. Outflanked, the British made a hasty retreat and finally came to battle on 27 July at Maiwand, on the road back to Kandahar. It proved to be one of Britain’s greatest military defeats of the Victorian era.

The Helmand the British found in the nineteenth century had much in common with what the coalition soldiers found in the dawn of the twenty-first. The people of Helmand were the Pashto-speaking tribes and subtribes, the same ethnic group who formed the majority of Afghanistan and who had overthrown the Persians and ruled the country since 1747. After centuries of dispute, the Pashtun people had settled a system of intricate land ownership and water rights that was rarely disturbed and was strictly divided up between tribes, each of whom was generally ruled locally by a pre-eminent chief, known as a khan.

By the end of the twentieth century new outside influences were beginning to be felt—arising both from the central Afghan government, now based in Kabul, and from foreigners. Once part of a greater Kandahar region, the lower part of the Helmand River basin had now become its own province, a region stretching from where the Helmand River left the high mountains to the northeast, to Pakistan and the Baluchi Mountains to the south, and to the empty desert of Nimroz Province to the southwest, where the river flowed out to dry in salt pans on the Iranian border. From one corner of the province to another was 302 miles, about the distance between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Between 1946 and 1959, American contractors constructed a new canal system to channel the Helmand waters.3 A vast acreage of newly irrigated land came into being along the river to the west of Lashkar Gah, a city that was now reborn and rebuilt along a series of square gridlines that was more akin to the American Midwest than the Orient. Crucially for the future, much of the new land was government-owned rather than tribally owned.

Then came the Soviet invasion on 27 December 1979. The war changed Afghanistan radically. It was not so much what the Soviets did themselves but how the foreign-backed war against the Soviets changed society. As the armed struggle gathered strength, powerful and ambitious new warlords challenged and displaced the old tribal khans. With them gone, some of the truces and understandings between local tribes that had kept relative peace in this land for centuries were shattered. And as society began to alter in war, Helmand suddenly discovered a new source of wealth and notoriety.

The first word of this change came in a report from the Helmand town of Musa Qala by a New York Times reporter named Arthur Bonner, who in 1986 had just completed a 1,000-mile journey across southern Afghanistan. He described the scene:

Fields of purple, red and white poppy flowers, contrasting brilliantly with the dull gray of the surrounding deserts, stretched toward the horizon. In one field, where the petals had fallen to the ground, a line of farmers scraped a brownish-black gum from pale green pods about the size of golf balls.4

Bonner claimed to have spoken to dozens of rebel commanders who asserted that the opium poppy was now being planted with a vengeance, apparently as a deliberate act of war. The most powerful commander in Helmand, reported Bonner, was Nassim Akhundzada, whose Alizai tribe was scattered over the mountainous north of the province. His home and major landholdings were in Musa Qala. And it was in that town that Bonner found Nassim’s elderly brother, Muhammad Rasul Akhundzada, who described himself as an Islamic teacher and had “a thick gray-and-black beard and large, watery eyes.” In the shade of an ancient tree beside the poppy fields, Muhammad Rasul explained his teachings to the farmers. The article read:

“We must grow and sell opium to fight our holy war against the Russian nonbelievers,” Mr. Rasul said. Comments like his were heard from dozens of rebels during the journey. Islam does not forbid the harvest, Mr. Rasul asserted. “Islamic law bans the taking of opium, but there is no prohibition against growing it,” he said.

In the years that followed, the Akhundzada family grew in power, and poppy cultivation spread far and wide. Within two decades, Helmand Province would produce more illegal drugs, according to the United Nations, than any country in the world.5

When the Soviet Army and its Communist puppet regime in Kabul were driven out of power at the end of the 1980s, it was Nassim Akhundzada who became the first governor of Helmand under the Mujahidin who took over. But the civil war continued, and his clan was driven from power in the mid-1990s by a new group of Islamic students who called themselves the Taliban (literally “the students” in Arabic). Nassim Akhundzada and his brother were both assassinated.

Though the Taliban was popular across much of the country for driving out the warlords and restoring security, the movement’s weakness was its close ties with some of the most violent anti-Western groups in the world. After Osama bin Laden used a base in Afghanistan to train and prepare for the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States invaded the country and toppled the Taliban with the help of its enemies.

Backed by other world powers, the United States persuaded the United Nations to help gather a loya jirga, a traditional gathering of tribal elders, to endorse its chosen new ruler, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal elder, as the new president of Afghanistan. The decision was later ratified with national elections.

The toppling of the Taliban also brought the return of the Akhundzada clan to Helmand. Muhammad Rasul’s son, Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, was now head of the family and became the new governor. He had befriended Karzai in exile in Pakistan. Karzai’s government, for Helmand and much of Afghanistan, meant the return of the warlords.

And the civil war was not over. Osama bin Laden had survived the U.S. invasion, and so had Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive Taliban supreme leader. From a hideout just over the border in Pakistan, the latter started rebuilding his forces.

In the years after 9/11, there were few Western forces in Helmand. Security was left mostly to local militias and small numbers of U.S. Special Forces, who kept a low profile. But in the summer of 2006, this all changed. The British Army returned to the banks of the Helmand after a gap of 126 years. Although the British had been in the north of the country since 2001, this was the first major combat mission. The aim was to bolster the Afghan government and provide security for economic development as part of a multination deployment organized by NATO, to be known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Soon, like the Soviets before them, the NATO troops were attacked wherever they went. Fighting was intense, probably as intense as anything seen here during the Soviet occupation. Within a year, the British force had swollen from a planned deployment of 3,300 men and women to nearly 7,000—more troops than the Red Army had ever deployed to the province.

As it had for centuries, power in Helmand rested on three pillars: land, water, and the trade routes. With the annual poppy crop of Helmand now estimated by the UN to be worth half a billion dollars a year to farmers,6 each of these was more valuable than ever. Control of scarce land and water meant control of the poppy crop, and control of the roads meant control over the smuggling of it. The Afghan government under President Karzai claimed that Taliban rebels were intimately involved with the poppy trade and taxed its revenues to fund their guerrilla war. But British and American intelligence also knew a more uncomfortable truth: that Afghan authorities in Helmand were as involved in the poppy trade as the Taliban.

Of all the scarce land in the Helmand basin, the most fertile and best irrigated was the land reclaimed from the desert with the help of American tax dollars in the 1950s. Most of it was government-owned, and most of it lay in the central strip of Helmand near Lashkar Gah. The best of Helmand’s poppy crop was in the zone claimed to be under the control of the government backed by Britain and America.

To the public, the war in Helmand was described as a battle for political power—a fledgling democracy fighting an Islamic radical movement, the Taliban, who were linked to terrorists. In reality, the war was more than anything about drugs. Drugs were turning tribe against tribe and family against family. It was shattering the old agreements that divided up the land and water. One tribe might choose the government to support its claim on the opium trade; another might choose the Taliban; and others might play one side against the other.

Before they arrived, the British had tried to intervene decisively against the drugs mafia. They had persuaded President Karzai to sack Sher Muhammad Akhundzada as governor after a raid by U.S. drug enforcement agents and Afghan police on Akhundzada’s compound found 9 metric ton of opium, the largest U.S. seizure in the country since 2002. The governor said it was stored contraband awaiting destruction, but few believed him.7

Yet when they arrived, the British declared a policy of non-interference with opium cultivation. Bases were built right next to poppy fields. The army declared destroying these crops would simply lead the population to support the Taliban. While Akhundzada might have been replaced as governor on paper by a more pro-Western technocrat, Muhammad Daoud, the sacked governor remained as close as ever to President Karzai. And then there were doubts about the Karzai family’s connections to others in the drugs trade, not least his own brother in Kandahar, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was frequently named in intelligence reports as being involved in the heroin business, although he denied any involvement.8

There were some who began to wonder, darkly, if NATO forces were being drawn into what was essentially a drug turf war.

In the autumn of 2007—nearly eighteen months after the first deployment in Helmand—a fresh set of British servicemen arrived to take over. Out of a deployment of 7,800 men and women, some 6,000 were destined for Helmand, to take charge of a multinational NATO brigade known as Task Force Helmand. The brigade also comprised Danish, Czech, and Estonian forces, making up a total strength in the province of just over 7,000 people. Working alongside them were U.S. Special Forces and reserve American units sent from Kandahar to assist the British in major combat operations.

The troops arriving came to a battleground that was mostly the fertile, irrigated land that stretched along the Helmand River and in its main tributary wadis. This was where the province’s population of just under one million people lived. The soldiers called it the “green zone.”

In broad terms, the Afghan government and NATO troops now controlled the main towns, where about one in twenty people normally lived. The Taliban generally controlled the populated countryside. No one controlled the open desert, through which both sides could move with ease but where there was little shelter for the Taliban to hide from NATO air power. It made little sense, then, for the Taliban to fight their battles there.

At the point where the Helmand River enters Helmand Province was the large Kajaki lake and dam.9 The hydroelectric plant was supposed to supply electricity from here across southern Afghanistan, but only one of its three turbines worked at full capacity: one had failed completely, and another was due to be shut down for maintenance. With the villages around deserted due to the fighting, a NATO outpost was in place to guard the dam and protect a team of U.S.-funded contractors who were hoping to repair the plant. The Taliban lay behind clear front lines to the north and south of the dam.

From Kajaki, the river flowed in a broadly southwesterly direction through a wide, Taliban-controlled canyon to the town of Sangin, a market town on the south bank of the river with a population of around 14,000 that had been heavily fought over but had returned to coalition control in the spring of 2007. From Sangin, the river continued to the southwest through a wider green valley and meandered 20 miles to Gereshk, a town with a population of 60,000, the second-biggest urban center in the province. The strategic Herat–Kandahar Highway that bridged the Helmand at Gereshk had been rebuilt in recent years and was now called the national Highway One. Like Russian troops before them, NATO relied on this road to transport its essential supplies. But it was also an essential artery of normal commerce for the country. Along Highway One in the desert to the west of Gereshk lay Camp Bastion, the largest British military base built anywhere since the Second World War.

Next along the river from Gereshk, just above the confluence...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Principal Characters
• Prologue: The Eyewitness
• Part I: The Rebellion
• Part II: The Population Is the Prize
• Part III: The Taliban Strikes Back
• Part IV: The Plan
• Part V: The Battle
• Part VI: The Aftermath
• Appendix: Killed in Action in Helmand Province, 17 September 2007–31 March 2008
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• Notes
• Maps
• Index
• Copyright Page