CHAPTER 12

3 Para JOC, Camp BASTION, Helmand, Afghanistan

Saturday 8 Jul 06 1600 hrs AFT

This was not Steve Alba’s first visit to the Joint Operations Center for the 3rd Parachute Battalion. Generally Steve’s place of business in Helmand was with the Brit PRT in Lashkar Gah, but on occasion, when a special situation came up, he, as well as the other key members of the PRT, would be called in to the JOC to add their two cents to the plan.

The JOC consisted of two large, heavily crowded modular tents. The perimeter of the tents was lined with six-foot folding tables, collapsible chairs, computers and plastic covered maps and statistic report forms. At the far end of the tents was a cluster of radio stations and their operators near what the Brits called a bird-table; a large, low horizontal table-like representation of the region which gave those standing around it a bird’s-eye view of the terrain and key features. Mercifully, today the air conditioning was working—it frequently failed—and the dust wasn’t blowing in too much leaving the scores of officers clustered around relatively comfortable.

Today was a special occasion but the PRT folks had the most minor role and as such were mostly relegated to the back and out of the way of the main actors seated in a thick cluster toward the front. The main draw at today’s event was a visit by Major-General Ben Freakley, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 76, the overall US Army command in Afghanistan based on Freakley’s 10^th Mountain Division from Fort Drum in up-state New York. Until the end of July, Freakley would be commanding all coalition forces in southern and eastern Afghanistan while ISAF commanded those in northern and western Afghanistan. At the end of the month the southern forces, the Canadians, Brits, Australians, Dutch and several other countries would pass to the command of ISAF leaving the Americans the eastern sector.

Freakley was a clean shaven, blunt talking, no nonsense fifty-two year old Virginian. The word was he’d been scathing about the Brits performance here since they came to Helmand. The criticism had started with the province’s governor, Engineer Daoud, who, apparently, had complained to the American Ambassador. The criticism was doubly disturbing to the Brits who not only felt that they had inadequate resources to meet all of Daoud’s requests, but also because Daoud was specifically their man. When discussions were initiated as to the Brit’s involvement in Helmand, they had made it clear that they wouldn’t come to Helmand unless the then governor, well suspected of corruption, was replaced by Karzai with Daoud. This Karzai had done and here the Brits were.

Freakley himself had made no bones about the fact that the Brits’ occupation of a number of small outposts only made them the target of attacks, kept them from being mobile and thus restricted their ability to take the fight to the Taliban. Freakley had told them over and over again that they should be putting pressure on the Taliban and simultaneously getting at reconstruction programs. The Brits for their part had been adamant that their deployments had been mostly to meet Daoud’s, and thereby Karzai’s, priorities and that they simply didn’t have the troops to carry out mobile operations. As for the reconstruction projects—well there was no getting away from it—the PRT was simply dysfunctional.

Steve got the gist of what was going on at this meeting.

Freakley had an operation running—Operation MOUNTAIN THRUST. The operation had started in mid-May and was scheduled to run through until the handover to ISAF at the end of July. The intent was to thoroughly disrupt the Taliban who had been massing in the mountains of northern Kandahar and northern Helmand provinces as well as the provinces of Uruzgan and Zabul. Canadians, Dutch, Australian, American and ANA troops had been involved in this major coordinated effort since that date; the British not so much. Tied down in their various villages, Brit offensive operations had been few and far between. Freakley had come here to change that.

 

— § —

 

Freakley had pushed the Brits hard for an operation to take out a major Taliban leadership compound in several madrasahs located several miles southeast of Sangin. SIGINT and satellite imagery had shown a concentration of forces and high value targets in the area. What had finally swung the balance in favor of the operation was a major commitment from the Canadians whose battalion was currently fighting their way through Panjwaii and Zhari. In effect the Brits would have a Canadian mechanized company attached to support an air assault by two of their para companies while the rest of the Canadian battalion, reinforced with a HMMWV equipped American infantry company, would guard the southern and eastern flanks.

The basic concept arrived at, the kids were thrown out of the room while the adults worked out the details of the operation.

Steve, as one of the kids, had made his way back to Lashkar Gah in company with the other key PRT players.

Steve had at first felt some enthusiasm. Freakley’s direction signaled a strong push to get the Brits on-stream both for operations as well as for reconstruction. That meant a return to profits. While the Brits were quite straight-laced, the underlying corruption within the local Afghan bureaucracy would more than make up for that; the Afghans would again open up the taps for under-the-counter payoffs. All that was needed was to get the cash flow started again.

Unfortunately, the ride back had reinforced how different the Brit approach to reconstruction was to that of the American. Steve heard the comment from the back of the vehicle “The Yanks are full of shit. We can’t do bricks and mortar until there’s enough security here.” Another voice chipped in, “We could if all the bloody civvies in DFIT would get their asses out of Kabul and come down here and bloody well do the work to figure out what projects we can do here.”

And therein lay the problem. The Brit military complained that the civilian staff responsible for planning and funding development, were refusing to leave their safe environments while the civilians argued that the military was failing in its task by not creating secure enough zones where development could take place. The Americans had been much less risk averse; they had done much work in Helmand with hardly any security force in place. Of the one or two Brit civilians who made it down to Helmand, none had the authority to approve projects. No approved projects, no funding. No funding, no profit for Hastati—or Steve. Time to put out feelers to see if we can ramp up some new projects with funding from State.