Pinned down in a series of "Alamos" across the north of Helmand, British soldiers became magnets for attacks from Taliban, drug gangs and locals

Back in 2005, the Blair government committed itself to rebuilding Afghanistan's Helmand province, with a vision that went far beyond what proved possible as revealed in the original planning document released to the BBC.

Helmand has proved by a long way to be the Afghan war's bloodiest ground.

It is the poorest province in one of the world's poorest countries. But some in Whitehall thought they could transform it into something closer to Belgium when Britain deployed there in the spring of 2006.

The hope was that not even a shot would be fired with troops home in 2009.

Instead, 323 British servicemen and women have so far been killed in Helmand, 9,500 British troops are still there and the vision has been revised to the development level of Bangladesh, at best, in another 20 years.

According to Mark Etherington, the planning team leader, they were confronted with a challenge on the ground of "biblical proportions" that bore no relation to what people in Whitehall had in mind.

It is easy to see why. A declassified copy of the Joint UK Plan for Helmand from December 2005, released to the BBC by the Foreign Office reveals:

"The state is largely absent in Helmand, providing little by way of security, infrastructure or public services."

Joint mission
Instead, Helmand's economy was based largely on heroin production - it provided up to half the global supply.



Profound challenges were identified in the report.
The current governor, chief of police and director of education are illiterate. 70% of the population is estimated to be illiterate.
The dominance of opium fuels a growing internal addiction problem and pervades public life through the influence it buys. Many prominent public figures are alleged to be involved in the trade, including those charged with suppressing it. The chief of the counter-narcotics police in Helmand has 20 staff and two ageing vehicles to cover a province three times the size of Wales with a population of more than one million.
The police force is widely thought to undermine the safety of the population rather than secure it. Reform of the police, perceived by the population as untrained, uneducated, unprofessional, drug-taking and corrupt…will require years to compete.
Provincial government in Helmand is dominated by patronage networks, tribal affiliation and alleged links to the narcotics trade. Interlocutors in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah complain about the corruption of key government officials and the sale of government land for private gain.
The security situation is perceived to have deteriorated over the last six months. The insurgency has been targeting government officials and Coalition forces. There is collusion between insurgents and narcotics traders. Illegally armed groups proliferate, particularly in inaccessible regions. Afghanistan's porous borders with Pakistan and Iran enable relatively unhindered transit through Helmand of insurgents and drug traffickers alike."
As a result, much of the province was controlled by warring drugs gangs and corruption reached practically every part of the administration.

Helmand was to be a joint military-civilian mission to extend the authority of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Protected by troops, civilians would build up the economy and the justice and education systems. The idea was to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Afghans away from the Taliban who were setting up their own shadow local administrations.

But after an initial assessment of the task, the planners returned to London in December 2005 and told Whitehall officials that their vision for Helmand was "not achievable in three years".

We were told that "was not an acceptable conclusion," said Minna Jarvenpaa, the governance adviser to the mission and a member of the planning team.

The vision in Whitehall was for levels of governance, growth in the economy and security occurring "without substantial security support from the international community" - a goal that is still a long way from being realised even today.

When the planners said they did not yet know enough about Helmand to put together a workable plan, a senior member of the secret intelligence service (MI6) is reported to have responded: "We know all we need to know".

Intelligence failure
In fact, the Joint UK Plan for Helmand shows precisely the reverse - in particular just how little was known about the complex dynamics of Helmand's tribal, criminal, religious and political factions.

And the military intelligence assessment failed to anticipate the scale or speed of the violent response from Taliban and other anti-British forces.

But the military momentum was unstoppable. Britain was going to Helmand, come what may.


323 British servicemen and women have so far been killed in Helmand
Because the mission was about reconstruction, only around 800 soldiers of the 3,300 deployment were "bayonets" - or fighters. The rest were mainly admin and logisticians.

So the mission was to be limited to a central area of Helmand around the capital Lashkar Gar and would slowly build out.

Except, that ambition was derailed almost from the start.

The report had highlighted a deteriorating security situation with attacks on government officials and coalition forces and collusion between insurgents and narcotics traders.

From the moment British troops arrived, Helmand's new governor, Mohammed Daoud, warned that his authority was being undermined by gunmen in the north of the province.

He urged Britain to deal with them by setting up extra bases.

Despite an initial judgment that even one extra base was "unsustainable", the military bowed to political pressure and by late June four additional bases had been established in Now Zad, Musa Qala, Kajaki and Sangin.

 

 

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