Surviving Afghanistan

Surviving Afghanistan

The task ahead of me seemed clear. Over four months I had to travel to every corner of the 13 districts that make up the province of Helmand and deliver a message. I had to gather together those who held power: the district chiefs, the tribal elders, the mullahs, the chief of police and explain to them why the UK were coming, what they were arriving with, how they were planning to use it and why this would make a difference to their livelihood. And in doing that, maybe, I could also gather some answers to address the significant gaps in our own knowledge.

To do this I had to travel in Land Rovers over hundreds of miles of desert and gravel plains, stay overnight in wadis under the stars, reach all the district centres, deliver my message, listen, debate and then live to tell the tale and report back my findings. The prospect of surviving that was at the same time both exhilarating and perturbing.

Helmand at the time I was there was a very different place to that which it was by the summer of 2006, when British forces were on the ground – locked in ferocious battle with a determined enemy. The arena I entered was far less violent but characterised by huge uncertainty and so, to survive, I had to take a number of obvious precautions to at least lessen the danger. I was allocated 15 soldiers as a defensive force who were well armed, trained as combat medics and able to call for air support if we got into trouble. The vehicles we travelled in were less than appropriate for the task. We were allocated four protected Land Rovers that were originally designed for the tarmac roads of Belfast, far from ideal – especially over the terrain we were crossing. On the other hand, the threat from the Taliban at the time seemed benign; there were no incidents of roadside bombs and ambushes, and my small group posed no threat.

 

 

Source Credit: This article originally appeared on Avaunt Magazine by . Read the original article - https://avauntmagazine.com/surviving-afghanistan/