Helmand Residents Question NATO Success Claims

NATO says Operation Lastay Kulang - or "Axe Handle" - which its forces launched in early June to clear the Taleban out of the Upper Sangin Valley has been an unqualified success.



"From Sangin to Greshk, the entire area is under government and ISAF control," said Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Mayo, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, ISAF. "The Taleban are weak. They are not able to fight with ISAF and the Afghan government."



There is, however, another version of this story, according to which Operation Lastay Kulang has been a miserable failure, causing death to civilians and destruction of homes and livelihoods without producing any lasting results.



“We took Kajaki district back from the NATO forces and the Afghan government and it is now completely under our control. We also took some parts of Sangin district,” said Taleban spokesman Qari Yusuf.



NATO and the Taleban may be about as far as possible away from each other on their view of Operation Lastay Kulang. But residents of the area are not swayed by spin - their daily lives are directly affected by the reality on the ground.



“At ten in the evening on Thursday [June 14], NATO took its soldiers away by helicopter," said Mahmadullah, a resident of Kajaki. "Then the Taleban came back. They took over those areas that NATO and the Afghan government captured two weeks ago, called Kata-Kajaki [lower Kajaki]".



Nazar Mohammad, also from Kajaki, confirmed this version of events. "When I woke up early on Friday morning, I went to the mosque," he told IWPR. "On my way there, I saw a lot of Taleban walking around, and I asked why they were there. All the people said, 'The British have left, and now the Taleban are back.'"



A Taleban district commander, who did not want to be named, was more specific: "The centre of Sangin and Sori-Gaari to the north of the centre, as well as the Tangay area, are under government control. The rest of Sangin, including Sarwan Qala, is the Taleban’s."



According to ISAF sources, a small number of British and American "advisors" are accompanying Afghan National Army, ANA, troops and driving northwards in a wedge from Greshk to Kajkai, clearing the area of insurgents. The foreign forces then push on, leaving the national troops to hold the area that has been taken.



But locals say that as soon as the last foreign boots leave the ground, the Taleban, deterred only by NATO's overwhelming air advantage and heavier armour, swarm back.



The area around Sangin and Kajaki is strategically important because it furnishes electricity to Helmand and to a great extent also neighbouring Kandahar. More than two million people depend on the Kajaki dam and hydroelectric power station, which are in need of major reconstruction. The power supply has been highly unstable since January, when Taleban insurgents began cutting electricity lines that run through Sangin.



The Provincial Reconstruction Team, PRT, in Lashkar Gah has been promising for months that work on the power station would soon begin, but the standoff between Taleban and ISAF has prevented any real progress from being made.



HEARTS AND MINDS GONE WRONG



Sangin, located between the provincial capital Lashkar Gah and Kajaki, has been the scene of bitter fighting in the last two months that has left much of the district centre a mass of rubble. In part to reach out to local residents and assure them that their concerns were being heard, ISAF organised a shura, or council, to confer with tribal elders in Sangin on June 7.



As hearts and minds campaigns go, it was certainly unique.



After a tentatively optimistic beginning, during which British forces listened sympathetically to complaints about the lack of water and electricity, the need for reconstruction, and demands for compensation for damages, a bearded American Special Forces officer who identified himself only as "Major Gill", jumped to his feet.



“You do not actually want assistance! You are all Taleban! It is my job to kill Taleban and I will not leave here until all the Taleban are gone,” he said, speaking through an interpreter.



As an angry murmur spread through the crowd, Gill continued, “You continue to allow the Taleban into your villages and homes. I have seen them misuse your women and children as human shields.



“The ISAF forces have come to help you, and you ask for power and water. But you don’t want schools and hospitals. No one will come to build these things if the Taleban are there and the workers are getting killed.”



Major Gill was not best served by his translator, in whose interpretation the words "You allow the Taleban to misuse your women and children" took on a slightly seedier meaning than Gill perhaps intended.



The American also took the somewhat unusual step of unilaterally offering amnesty to Taleban fighters, although forgiveness under the law is normally the prerogative of a country’s elected government.



"The Taleban should come and lay down their arms and we will guarantee that no one will say anything to them," the US officer told the white-bearded elders, who by now were standing up and shouting, some making threatening gestures.



"Do you want us to dig up our dead women and children so you can see that they were not Taleban?" said Gul Agha, an elder who had to be physically restrained by his colleagues. "The British do not help us. They just come for a look, and then leave again. They kill civilians, innocent people."



"You came to arrest the Taleban but you can’t do it!" screamed another man.



Gill continued, seemingly unperturbed.



"Millions of dollars are coming into Sangin," he said. "If you don’t grow poppy, we will spend the money on you."



The US Congress recently passed a 6.4 billion US dollar assistance package for Afghanistan, the Afghanistan Freedom and Security Support Act. But the bill mandates a cut-off of aid to those provinces and districts that support "terrorists" or continue to grow opium poppy.



Helmand is far and away the leader in Afghanistan's drugs trade; according to a 2006 survey by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This one province furnishes close to 40 per cent of the world's supply of heroin. Despite stirring rhetoric and billions of dollars spent on the counter-narcotics effort, this year's crop looks certain to be even larger, according to provincial officials.



Given the disappointing results of assistance programmes to date, the anti-poppy speeches may be a bit of a hard sell in the province.



"We will never stop cultivating poppy until the end of your life, Gill," said one shura member who did not want to be named. "This is our land and our livelihood. If we stop planting poppy life will get much harder."



SECURITY A “LIE"



Sangin's district governor, Ezatullah, insisted that the area was getting back to normal.



“We have created a tribal shura and invited people of every tribe, and the people have assured us that they will help us with security," he said. "We will start first with power and water, and then begin to rebuild the bombed-out houses."



But Afghan army officials say privately that there is no real security in Sangin.



"Those foreign [expletive deleted] say there is security – it’s a lie," fumed one commander. "They don’t risk their asses out here. There are Taleban right in the district centre, but the British and the Americans stay in their holes."



This latest operation against the insurgency has been costly. While exact figures are difficult to come by, most accounts track hundreds of civilian casualties, and dozens of ANA deaths. The British and American forces have also sustained losses, with seven killed in a helicopter crash in early June, and dozens others killed or injured in fighting or terrorist attacks over the past three months.



"The Taleban are all over the place," said Abdul Hakim, a resident of Sangin. "The British will never be able to get rid of them. We now have troops from 35 countries. They could make it 70 countries, and still they wouldn’t succeed."



SANGIN A GHOST TOWN



Locals have had enough of empty promises. Sangin's bazaar is almost entirely flattened, and those walls still standing exhibit black gaping mouths instead of doors.



The town itself is almost deserted, with a few isolated specks of life. The small army of journalists at the shura had to hunt hard to find residents to interview.



Most people were unwilling to talk.



"I saw 18 people killed here in this bazaar," said Noor Mohammad, a young shopkeeper. "Not even a cat can live here now. Anyone who so much as moved was shot so full of holes he looked like a soup strainer."



According to Noor Mohammad, barely three per cent of the shops are now open.



Abdul Razzaq, who had a small shop in the bazaar, looked sadly at the ruins of his enterprise.



"I lost 50,000 rupees worth of goods, and mine was the smallest shop," he said, shaking his head. “Others lost much more – millions in damages.



"I don’t think the British have got even with us yet. There will be more bombs," he said.



But some local people seem to be taking the harsh lessons of the past month to heart, and are uniting to deny the Taleban access to their homes and their villages.



In May, an insurgent attack on coalition forces called down a retaliatory strike that all but flattened the village of Sarwan Qala. In response, residents rose up against the Taleban, chasing down and killing a commander and his deputies.



"There was a fight between locals and the Taleban, and Commander Wali Mohammad and his two friends were killed," said Sultan Mahmud, chief of police in Sangin district. "They captured their weapons, and now the people are more powerful than the Taleban."



Some of Sangin’s residents agree.



"Last week the American Major Gill accused us of being Taleban," said one shopkeeper. "But we are against the Taleban. We won’t let the Taleban use our houses and our people.



“In Sangin district people are getting closer to the government, because right now the Taleban are weak. We will help the government kick the Taleban out of Sangin district."



IWPR is implementing a journalism training and reporting project in Helmand. This story is a compilation of reports filed by the trainees.