‘Pashtun Dawn’ on Salisbury Plain

The commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Plant, is sitting with a cup of coffee in the kitchen of our house in the middle of the Plain, the Army’s primary training area — 150 square miles of rough pasture bought by the War Office over a century ago. Six months earlier he had spoken of his concern that there might be an “IED legacy” in the collective mind of the regiment. Had those concerns been realised, I ask? “Absolutely not”, he replies. “I needn’t have worried. There’s such confidence in the training.”

The Light Dragoons have just finished their part in the exercise, and we are talking before the 3 Yorks deaths, but when I go to 12 Mechanized Brigade’s “Media Day” a few days later, I hear this confidence echoed by men of different capbadges: you can’t eliminate the risk, but you can reduce it through constantly updating your tactics, techniques and procedure.

Helicopters clatter overhead as we drink our coffee, but I tell Colonel Sam that it’s been the quietist pre-deployment exercise I’ve heard — nothing like the number of bangs, big or small, of previous “Herricks”. He is intrigued by this: they have certainly done as much “warfighting” training as last time, when he was commanding a squadron — they’ve got to be prepared for the worst — but the emphasis now is not on taking the fight to the insurgents, as it was in 2009, but on getting the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the country’s army and police, ready to take over at the end of 2014. “So a lot of what we’re doing is counterintuitive — waiting rather than taking the initiative. There’s an element of tough love.”

Indeed, while exercise names are sometimes randomly generated, “Pashtun Dawn” carries with it the notion of “transition”, as it is called, the ANSF “taking back sovereignty”. Brigadier Doug Chalmers, commander 12 Mechanized Brigade, illustrates this rather well at the media day with a photograph of an operational briefing during his reconnaissance in Helmand: “Look whose finger is pointing on the map”, he says; “it’s the Afghan brigadier’s, not the British.”

So if the end is in sight, I ask Colonel Sam, does it make his dragoons more risk-averse? He thinks not, “because the nature of the campaign is changing at such a pace. The absolute focus on developing ANSF means that we’re constantly considering our posture, training and approach, and this, to my mind, keeps us fresh and focused.”

But what about the bigger picture: does the lack of political, economic and social progress, the corruption at the highest levels, and the insurgency spreading to previously quiet parts of Afghanistan (and, now, the shootings by a rogue American soldier) make him and his dragoons question the value of what they are doing? Of course it does, he acknowledges, for they are thinking soldiers, but then he echoes what the brigade commander says when asked the same question at the media day: “I’m a tactical commander. My job is to focus on day-to-day operations. And the progress on the ground is incontrovertible.” Their work could be undone if things at the top and elsewhere in the country weren’t fixed; but unless they did their job — getting the ANSF ready to take back the security of their country — no amount of political and social reform would stand a chance.

There is another factor too — reputation. The Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, writing in The Times the day after the Taleban mine, talks of “securing our legacy and the reputation of our Forces. In itself that reputation helps to secure our interests. It reassures our friends and deters our enemies.” Colonel Sam is the first “cradle Light Dragoon” to command (previous commanding officers had been commissioned into one or other of the pre-amalgamation regiments). He is conscious that in command he is a bird of passage, and that after the regiment’s welfare, securing — enhancing even — the regiment’s reputation is his bottom line.

But what of the “home front”, I ask. How are the families bracing up?

To Colonel Sam “family regiment” is no empty phrase. When he finishes his coffee he will drive to Hull (the Light Dragoons recruit in Yorkshire and Tyneside, and like to call themselves “England’s Northern Cavalry”) where the mothers, fathers, sisters, cousins and aunts of his dragoons have been invited to come to a briefing in, appropriately, the RSM’s old school. He has already briefed the wives at the regiment’s base in Norfolk, where, he tells me, the community is incredibly supportive, and he will be doing more briefings around the recruiting area.

He knows he has his work cut out with the growing media clamour to “Pull the troops out now; we can’t win”, and is as frustrated as the soldiers I talk to at the media day that the public just don’t seem to understand what they are going to Helmand to do.

No one has any illusions, however. “Afghanistan will be a mess for many years to come, but it will be an improving mess,” said Sir Christopher Patey, the British ambassador in Kabul, in a farewell interview last week.

It is this sort of realistic, Fabian approach that the Light Dragoons — 12 Mechanized Brigade as a whole — are taking to what will be a critical six months in the process of transition.