Camp Bastion, Helmand province O utside the Joint Support Unit HQ
here stands a cross rising from a mound of cobbles. On each of the four sides of the mound is set a brass plate for the names of those British soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. The second of the four plates is almost full. At the precise moment that we walk past it, the Union flag is being adjusted to half-mast — the 96th man has just died, killed by a mine. The CO has told us that the camp will take from seven to ten years to complete. So, at the present rate of death, by then the memorial will need at least eight plates — for which there is no room. Although the camp is well organised and neat, the place is unutterably bleak. The landscape has almost no features at all. ‘The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ Our little party, led by Andrew Mitchell, the shadow secretary for International Development, is trying to find out what is happening in Afghanistan. But first we have to find the helicopter to take us on to the British camp at Lashkar Gah. While we wait, we are introduced to the camp’s dog section. We are taken into a yard in the full sun — the temperature in the shade is about 110˚F. An Alsatian is getting further training. In England, he has been taught only to bite the arm, but here he must go for the legs. So one man holds him on a lead; a second, dressed in a long, black Afghan shirt, so that the dog does not learn to bite British uniforms, beats the air with a swagger stick to provoke him; a third, quite stout, climbs into a grotesque suit made of stuff like the lagging on a boiler. He staggers around in the dust until the maddened dog sinks its teeth into his thigh and pulls him down. When it is all over, the man’s helmet is pulled off. He has gone deep red and is plastered with sweat. ‘We call it the fat stripper,’ says the happy corporal from Wallasey, who puts the interests of dogs before those of people.
Helicopters have to come in and out fast to give as little time as possible to present a target. You rush to them, bending against the wind from the blades, and scramble up beside a man training his machine-gun on the surrounding landscape. As the engine gathers pace, it somehow scoops in the exterior air and heats it some more, so you feel like bread being put into an oven. Away we go, over the poppy fields, everywhere visible, which have just been harvested to extract opium. Beside the helicopter landing pad at Lashkar Gah, a tall, blonde, young woman leans elegantly against the guard tower, waiting to receive us, so pleasingly out of place that this could be a scene from a film. She turns out to be Nicky, from counternarcotics. The next morning, Nicky puts on a head-dress to meet Afghans, and takes us in the mandatory bomb-proof vehicles with armed guards to see the Afghan counternarcotics police. Our driver is ex-RUC. Strange how these fine men are prized all over the world but spurned in their home province which they protected.
The deputy chief of the drug police, a colonel of high reputation, receives us, because no one trusts his boss. With him is the local prosecutor, a handsome man with a very white beard and strong black eyebrows; he has some English, unusually, but, while others talk, he seems to study a devotional book. The colonel says that his officers in Lashkar Gah are at less than half their promised strength. He never informs police chiefs before an anti-drugs operation because it would then be compromised; no prosecution of anyone important is ever permitted. There are, he says, ‘no proper humans in the police’: they are either addicts (more than 50 per cent is the estimate) or ‘mental’, and largely, like 96 per cent of Helmand’s population, illiterate. Since 31 March, the money provided by the Crown Agents to improve the salaries of the counter-narcotics police has ended, and the cash been transferred to the Ministry of the Interior, the most corrupt of all the ministries. According to the prosecutor, when Mullah Omar of the Taleban saw large groups of men travelling between Kandahar and Helmand, he asked what they were doing. He was told they were drug-smugglers: ‘He just cut a knife into a watermelon and said, “Stop it.” It stopped.’ But the current government, says the prosecutor, commands no such authority. (In all our meetings in Lashkar Gah, no Afghan dares criticise the Taleban.) As for poppy eradication, it is ‘a play game for kids’, put on to humour the ‘internationals’. As we leave, I ask him about his holy book. He opens it. It is not holy at all, but full of English words he has painstakingly noted from the television.
We visit the Lashkar Gah version of the Priory, paid for by the British Foreign Office. It is a clean, friendly place. Men sit on beds, six to a room, detoxing. Some begin their opium habit just by licking their fingers while they harvest. Others tell me they were smugglers, and became addicts in the process. There are about 30 patients, and a waiting list of 1,300. Outside, a sign in large letters touchingly proclaims: ‘ADDICTION destroys social value, validation, nice youthfulness of the young generation and ruin all the wishes and hopes of the life.’ In a country where the life expectancy is 42, the nice youthfulness of the young generation is rare indeed. I felt I saw it only in the Turquoise Mountain Project, set up by the remarkable British ex-diplomat and author Rory Stewart, in Kabul. Rory, whose work attracts no British government money, sees culture as a key to development. He invented the charity three years ago, and now it employs 350 people, resurrecting Afghan arts and crafts. In a converted fort, I watched young people learning pottery, woodwork and calligraphy according to traditional methods which almost died out in the long civil war. Then Rory took me to the old city, reached through a narrow street where I saw a man frightening a child with a snake, and wicker cages containing partridges for sale for fighting (‘a poor sport’, says Rory). Turquoise Mountain has leased seven and a half acres, and is literally digging early 19th-century houses and courtyards out of seven feet of accumulated rubbish. Their lattice-work, their ingenious folding patayi shutters and their plaster are being restored. As we sat at tea, a voice called from the courtyard below. We looked out, and there was the local bird man, who trains pigeons to tumble. He had proudly procured for Rory a peacock and a peahen. They strutted round the little yard, before being put into open shopping baskets (the cock’s noble tail feathers sticking out) and borne in triumph to the fort.
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