The dead dog, half buried in a field of opium poppies and putrefying in the Afghan sun, presented us with a dilemma. Alert to the threat from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), my companions knew the cost of a British army boot stepping onto the wrong patch of dusty red soil. They were especially alert when an obstacle — a dead dog, for example — might tempt the unwary to step off a path and into danger.
Big Dave, a soldier given the job of keeping me out of trouble, instructed me to walk only in his exact footsteps as we picked our way around. I needed no second telling. We passed the dead dog, its teeth bared by rotting flesh, without incident.
I was on patrol with Scottish soldiers in Musa Qala, the town that was the front line of battles between the British Army and the Taliban during 13 years of UK military operations in Helmand. For a short time in 2008 I was embedded in the town with 52 Brigade of the army, just as they were coming to the end of a six-month tour of duty that included wrestling control of Musa Qala from the Taliban in one of the bloodiest operations of the conflict.
It was with a combination of dread, anger and helplessness, then, that I heard earlier this week that Musa Qala had fallen once more into the hands of Taliban fighters. It was abandoned by Afghan government forces on Wednesday despite airstrikes by US warplanes that reportedly killed 40 Taliban attackers at the weekend.
This was terrible news. My first thought was of a tall stone monument in the centre of the town, where a decade ago the Taliban had displayed the severed heads of local men they considered collaborators with western forces. How many of the Musa Qala “shura” of elders, with whom I had shared a meal of goat stew and fresh tomatoes, would now be fearing a similar fate?
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My second thought was for the Scottish soldiers I had lived with, who risked their lives to pursue the British government’s aims in Afghanistan, and who regarded Musa Qala as a crucial buffer against Taliban power in the region. Twenty British soldiers died in and around the Musa Qala and Nawzad region in the course of the conflict. Was their sacrifice really to be in vain?
I will remember my time in Musa Qala for as long as I live: the 14-year-old boys casually cradling AK47s in their laps, their eyes following us down the town’s main street; the ragged metal blast damage on an armoured truck that had been carrying young Scots squaddies when it hit an IED; the lurch in my stomach when news came in to HQ that a soldier had been shot in the back on patrol in the nearby wadi, and the long wait for news he was alive and had been “medevac’d” to safety.
Indelible experiences. But for some reason, in my mind I keep coming back to the sight and stench of the rotting dog. It’s the first thing I now think of when I remember Musa Qala, and it is a hard image to shake.
The taking of Musa Qala by UK and US troops in December 2007, and the subsequent attempt to win over the population, is compellingly described in a book called Operation Snakebite by the former Sunday Times reporter Stephen Grey. Despite the best intentions of commanders such as Andrew Mackay, the Scottish head of 52 Brigade, the British Army was simply not configured for what military jargon calls “non-kinetic soldiering” — the battle for hearts and minds.
Mr Grey describes how a soldier’s rules of engagement made it simple to use a Javelin missile worth £70,000 each — “We used them as a sniper rifle, for people-sized targets,” a major told him — but the paperwork to give an Afghan farmer $100 to dig a ditch could take weeks.
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There are lessons aplenty in Britain’s mishandling of the Afghan conflict. But none is more shameful than David Cameron’s decision to cut and run.
British forces left Helmand far too early, when the Afghan government forces were still in no fit state to ensure the most basic security. When Mr Cameron ordered that British combat troops leave the country by 2015 there were no qualifying ifs or buts on the readiness of their replacements.
Mr Cameron was, of course, faithfully reflecting the British public’s desire to disentangle itself from its foreign wars as quickly as possible, and for there to be no more dignified funeral corteges through the streets of Royal Wootton Bassett.
But the pull-out was premature, not just by the British but by the Americans, too. In December last year, Abdullah Abdullah, number two in the Afghan government, expressed dismay at the speed of the withdrawal. “It is too abrupt,” he said. “Two years ago we had 150,000 international troops and lots of jets and helicopters. Within two months there will be just 12,000.”
That concern appears to have been well founded. Although there have been some successes — there was enough security across the country to allow the democratic election of a new president, Ashraf Ghani, late last year — the Taliban have made sure that tentative peace talks have been carried out against a background of aggressive insurgent attacks, of growing effectiveness.
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Last night a counterassault by the Afghan government in a bid to retake Musa Qala was under way. If it fails, this week’s events may turn out to be a milestone in Afghan history, for all the wrong reasons. Having taken the decision to pull out, leaving just advisers and training personnel, the British can only watch and ponder once more the failings of UK strategy in recent ground wars.
Britain’s involvement in Iraq was a disaster, ending in an ignominious retreat from Basra which, under British control, had descended into anarchy. The British legacy in Afghanistan could, in contrast, have been a relatively good one. Having deprived the Taliban of its capability to export terror, the Allies could have cleared the space necessary for a new democracy to take root. It could at least have allowed the loved ones of those who died the thought that British blood was spilt for a purpose.
Instead, with growing Taliban power and the loss of Musa Qala, our decision to cut and run leaves a stench worse than a dead dog left out to rot in the Afghan sun.