Britain's war on two frontlines: In Afghanistan and Iraq, two missions, one deadly outcome

21 January 2007
The Independent UK

The offensive reported on the previous pages highlights the very different dangers faced by UK troops in the killing fields of Helmand and the streets of Basra. By Raymond Whitaker

Britain's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have claimed the lives of three servicemen in combat so far this month - but they are very different conflicts.

Two Royal Marines died in operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan's Helmand province, where British forces are pushing hard to dislodge as many insurgents as possible before an expected offensive which may come as early as next month. The aim is to convince the local population that the Nato forces of which the British form part are stronger than the Taliban, and that their best interests lie in opposing the insurgents.

In Iraq, by contrast, the battle for hearts and minds has all but been given up. Although efforts continue to root out rogue elements in the Basra police, troops are largely staying within their bases and seeking to avoid casualties. A steady trickle of losses to small arms fire, mortars and roadside bombs continues, however, with another soldier killed on patrol last week.

The British military, in short, is on the front foot in Afghanistan and on the back foot in Iraq. But the number of troops stationed in and around Basra - around 7,100 - is still well above the total in Helmand, where some 4,000 troops are based out of a total force in Afghanistan of about 5,200. While the US prepares to send in extra forces to seize control of Baghdad, British military chiefs have long sought to "draw down" their Iraq contingent so that the Afghan mission can be beefed up. The delays in achieving this are beginning to impose increasing strains on forward planning.

Last week the new US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, who replaced the discredited Donald Rumsfeld, toured Afghanistan as well as Iraq, where he visited Basra. In Afghanistan American commanders asked him for more troops, and Mr Gates said he was "sympathetic" to their request. He refused to be more specific, saying: "It depends on different scenarios." But in the wake of his remarks it emerged Britain was also looking at ways of stepping up its force in Afghanistan.

Hillary Clinton, who yesterday announced her presidential bid in 2008, visited Afghanistan last week with a group of US Senators. "This is the great missed opportunity that I fear we're going to stumble on, because Afghanistan is, so far, quite a success story," she said. "We should be putting troops into Afghanistan to be ready for what will be a spring offensive by the Taliban."

The US, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands, the four nations bearing the brunt of the fighting in southern Afghanistan, have for months been seeking about 2,500 more front-line troops to form a "quick reaction force", ready to intervene when clashes with the Taliban flare up. With the fighting expected to intensify within weeks as winter eases its grip, the need for such a force has become urgent. Since other Nato members refuse to commit more troops or change the rules of engagement of their contingents in Afghanistan, however, London and Washington now appear to accept that they will have to supply their own reinforcements.

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the senior American commander in Afghanistan, said he had asked for 1,200 soldiers who are due to leave soon to stay to the end of the year. But with the US now pledged to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq, it may be faced with the same problems of "overstretch" confronting British military chiefs.

What the military calls the "kinetic" nature of the conflict in Afghanistan was shown by the operation in which Lance Corporal Mathew Ford was killed. The Royal Marines were attempting to storm a Taliban fortress near Garmsir in southern Helmand when he was hit. His comrades realised he was missing when they withdrew across the Helmand river, and four of them volunteered to strap themselves to struts on the outside of an Apache helicopter in an attempt to rescue him. Although they succeeded in extracting him, his life could not be saved.

No such dramatic incident has taken place in southern Iraq since the early days of the fighting immediately after the invasion in 2003. The vicious civil war which is draining away American lives further north in Iraq has no counterpart here, but any attempt by British forces to assert their authority in and around Basra leads to an immediate spate of retaliatory attacks by groups allied to the main Shia militias, which in turn command influence in Baghdad.

But plans to reduce the British troop presence in Iraq by some 3,000 early in the year have receded, according to Louise Heywood, UK forces analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in London. Although some hundreds might be withdrawn before the summer, she believed the security situation remained too fragile for the main drawdown to take place until the second half of 2007.

Ms Heywood added that careful thought would have to be given to the role of any reinforcements sent to southern Afghanistan. "Will they go there simply to fight the insurgency, or to build capacity for reconstruction and development, which is supposed to be their main mission?" she asked. "The situation British forces have found in Helmand is very pressing, but if more troops are sent there just to fill gaps and fight, it could simply give the Taliban more targets to shoot at."

Families mourn British soldiers who died on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan

Britain lost three servicemen in as many days last week - a soldier in Iraq and two Royal Marines in Afghanistan. They came from different corners of the country and died in different circumstances, but they had one thing in common: all three had dreamt as boys of the military life. Their deaths brought the total number of British personnel killed since 2001 to 129 in Iraq and 46 in Afghanistan.

Kingsman Alexander Green

Kingsman Green of the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment died last Saturday, aged 21. He was hit by small-arms fire in Hayy Al Muhandisn, Basra. Kingsman Green joined the Army at 19 and was identified by commanders as a professional soldier, dedicated to his job. Chris Pegman, head teacher at St Margaret's primary school in Warrington, where he was a pupil, said: "Even at that age he was keen on the Army." The military and his two-year-old son were his life.

"It was all he wanted to do," his family said. "He was living his dream."

Marine Thomas Curry

Marine Curry, also aged 21, of 42 Commando Royal Marines, was killed by small-arms fire the same day, 13 January, fighting the Taliban near Kajaki in northern Helmand, Afghanistan. "Vinders", as he was known, joined the forces aged 19. "He was always very determined," said his father. "He wanted to be there serving his country. It was what he loved." Marine Curry proposed to his girlfriend, Carla Maynard, on the phone on Christmas Day. She said: "We had some wonderful times. I just loved him so much."

Lance Corporal Mathew Ford

Lance Corporal Ford will also be remembered for his bravery. He was serving with 45 Commando, the Royal Marines, and died on Monday during an offensive to the south of Garmsir in southern Helmand, Afghanistan. Aged 30, he had planned to leave the service to settle down and start a family with his fiancée, Ina. His mother Joan said: "We are all devastated by the news of Mathew's death. His love for life and his ability to make everyone laugh will always be with us."

--Charlotte Ashton

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Opium war revealed: Major new offensive in Afghanistan

Published: 21 January 2007
The Independent UK

The Kabul government is planning to take the war to its illegal drugs trade. And once again, it will put Britain's exhausted troops back into the firing line. Raymond Whitaker reports


British troops in southern Afghanistan, already engaged in stiff fighting with the Taliban, face a new threat as the Kabul government prepares to crack down on the country's rampant drugs trade.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that in the next week to 10 days, 300 members of the Afghan Eradication Force (AEF), protected by an equal number of police, will begin destroying fields of ripening opium poppies in the centre of lawless Helmand province, where Britain has some 4,000 troops. While British forces will not be directly involved in the operation, commanders concede that they will have to go to the aid of the eradication teams if they encounter armed resistance. "A backlash is definitely possible," said one senior officer.

The poppy fields to be targeted are on the Helmand river near Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital and headquarters of the British task force. The area has deliberately been selected because it is in the relatively peaceful "development zone", well away from the fighting which claimed the lives of two Royal Marines in the past week. "These people are growing poppy out of greed rather than need," a British counter-narcotics official in Lashkar Gah told the IoS. "They could earn a living by other means."

The Afghan government has rejected calls for defoliants to be sprayed on the crop, and the plants will be cut down by hand, or crushed by tractors dragging heavy metal bars behind them. The British official said there were some 22,000 hectares of opium poppies in the target area. The Afghan operation might destroy up to a third, if it didn't encounter trouble, "but it depends on the security situation as much as anything".

The attempted crackdown will be a crucial test of the Afghan government's willingness and ability to gain control over an illegal drugs trade which not only helps to finance the Taliban insurgency, but contributes to endemic violence and corruption, reaching to the highest levels of President Hamid Karzai's administration. Afghanistan produces over nine-10ths of the world's illicit opium, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and more comes from Helmand than any of the country's other 28 provinces. Half of the heroin on British streets originates there.

Despite the deployment of British forces in Helmand last year, opium production in the province soared by 160 per cent, faster than anywhere else in Afghanistan. A record crop was harvested in May under the noses of arriving British troops, and the area under cultivation increased further during the autumn planting season.

"It is is wall-to-wall poppies everywhere you look, just a mile or two from Lashkar Gah," said a source who travelled out of the provincial capital last week. "There was some early planting by people hoping to beat any crackdown, but the weather has also favoured growers, with rain at just the right time. The crop will be earlier this year than in 2006."

As soon as they moved to southern Afghanistan, senior British officers dissociated themselves from suggestions in Whitehall that they would seek to stamp out the drugs trade. They were aware that a badly handled eradication operation in 2002 had sown deep bitterness: big growers paid bribes to save their crops, and it was small farmers with no other livelihood who suffered. Funds to compensate them were misspent or stolen.

Poppy cultivation has since been declared illegal, and no compensation will be paid this time. "The aim is to go after the big operators, who grow opium with impunity on government-owned land they have seized," said the official. "It will be a powerful disincentive if they are seen to have lost their crops, although some smaller farmers will inevitably suffer. But they are in an area where funds are available, mainly from USAid, for 'cash for work' projects, such as road building and canal clearing."

International pressure has been applied to the Kabul government to remove officials implicated in the drugs trade, such as Abdul Rahman Jan, the former police chief of Helmand. Last February the provincial governor was sacked and replaced by Mohammed Daud, an English-speaking engineer and ex-UN worker.

When he fell victim in December to internal political wrangling, it was feared that his deputy, Amir Muhammad Akhundzada, a member of a clan with close links to the drugs trade in northern Helmand, would take over, but he too was ousted.

This month's eradication move is being carried out by the Kabul government, with the provincial administration having no say. The local authorities are supposed to make their own efforts to stamp out narcotics, but Governor Daud, fearing the backlash from destruction of crops, concentrated instead on seeking to persuade farmers not to plant poppies. It is understood that his successor, Asadullah Wafa, will meet President Karzai in Kabul tomorrow to discuss further measures to deal with the trade.

Even if the AEF succeeds in destroying a third of the poppies in their target area, or about 7,000 hectares, that would be barely one-10th of the total under cultivation in Helmand, which could still produce more opium this year than last. But the British official said eradication was only one strand of an anti-drugs strategy in which the main priority was to target the big traffickers.

An international think tank, the Senlis Council, is backing a radically different approach to the Afghan drugs problem. It says the world is suffering a shortage of legal opiates for medical use, and argues that buying up the entire Afghan poppy crop for legitimate purposes would not only be more cost-effective, but would cut out the traffickers and lead to a sharp reduction in violence. The group says this strategy worked in Turkey, which was one of the main sources of illicit opium and heroin in the 1960s before switching to legal production.

But the British official dismissed the plan, saying it would founder on Helmand's "utter lawlessness". He added: "In Turkey they were able to force farmers to sell their crop to legal buyers. Here they will sell to the highest bidder, and the traffickers will always go higher, because they can still make a profit. The economics don't hold up."

Opium: Facts and figures

Opium dominates Afghanistan's economy: the illegal trade is worth $2.6bn (£1.3bn) a year, more than a third of the country's gross domestic product.

ORIGINS: A traditional crop for centuries in the mountainous border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the opium trade exploded during the 1980s, when it helped to finance the mujahedin war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

BLOWBACK: With heroin laboratories springing up on both sides of the border, gun violence, corruption and drug use has spread in Pakistan, which has some three million heroin addicts.

THE TALIBAN: After the Pakistan-sponsored Taliban swept to power in Afghanistan in 1996, it initially raised money by taxing opium production. But under UN pressure it finally cracked down, reducing the area under cultivation from 91,000 hectares in 1999 to only 8,000 in 2001, when it was ousted in the wake of 9/11 for hosting Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida.

EXPLOSION: Opium growing soared as soon as the Taliban fell, rising to 74,000 hectares in 2002. The head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says it reached over 400,000 hectares last year, producing a record 6,100 tonnes of opium - 92 per cent of the world supply.

HELMAND: Afghanistan's largest province produces 40 per cent of its opium and half the heroin in Britain. The poppy-growing area grew 160 per cent in 2006.

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Global warming: the final verdict

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer

A study by the world's leading experts says global warming will happen faster and be more devastating than previously thought .

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.

'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinised intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived this process. This is a very conservative document - that's what makes it so scary,' said one senior UK climate expert.

Climate concerns are likely to dominate international politics next month. President Bush is to make the issue a part of his state of the union address on Wednesday while the IPCC report's final version is set for release on 2 February in a set of global news conferences.

Although the final wording of the report is still being worked on, the draft indicates that scientists now have their clearest idea so far about future climate changes, as well as about recent events. It points out that:

· 12 of the past 13 years were the warmest since records began;

· ocean temperatures have risen at least three kilometres beneath the surface;

· glaciers, snow cover and permafrost have decreased in both hemispheres;

· sea levels are rising at the rate of almost 2mm a year;

· cold days, nights and frost have become rarer while hot days, hot nights and heatwaves have become more frequent.

And the cause is clear, say the authors: 'It is very likely that [man-made] greenhouse gas increases caused most of the average temperature increases since the mid-20th century,' says the report.

To date, these changes have caused global temperatures to rise by 0.6C. The most likely outcome of continuing rises in greenhouses gases will be to make the planet a further 3C hotter by 2100, although the report acknowledges that rises of 4.5C to 5C could be experienced. Ice-cap melting, rises in sea levels, flooding, cyclones and storms will be an inevitable consequence.

Past assessments by the IPCC have suggested such scenarios are 'likely' to occur this century. Its latest report, based on sophisticated computer models and more detailed observations of snow cover loss, sea level rises and the spread of deserts, is far more robust and confident. Now the panel writes of changes as 'extremely likely' and 'almost certain'.

And in a specific rebuff to sceptics who still argue natural variation in the Sun's output is the real cause of climate change, the panel says mankind's industrial emissions have had five times more effect on the climate than any fluctuations in solar radiation. We are the masters of our own destruction, in short.

There is some comfort, however. The panel believes the Gulf Stream will go on bathing Britain with its warm waters for the next 100 years. Some researchers have said it could be disrupted by cold waters pouring off Greenland's melting ice sheets, plunging western Europe into a mini Ice Age, as depicted in the disaster film The Day After Tomorrow.

The report reflects climate scientists' growing fears that Earth is nearing the stage when carbon dioxide rises will bring irreversible change to the planet. 'We are seeing vast sections of Antarctic ice disappearing at an alarming rate,' said climate expert Chris Rapley, in a phone call to The Observer from the Antarctic Peninsula last week. 'That means we can expect to see sea levels rise at about a metre a century from now on - and that will have devastating consequences.'

However, there is still hope, said Peter Cox of Exeter University. 'We are like alcoholics who have got as far as admitting there is a problem. It is a start. Now we have got to start drying out - which means reducing our carbon output.'

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