Whisper it... but maybe our boys didn't die in vain: In this brilliant dispatch, EVGENY LEBEDEV meets British troops in Helmand - and despite the butchery of the Taliban finds glimmers of hope for a land that's cost us so much blood

Stretched across the valleys and mountains of Helmand are too many corners of a foreign field that will be forever not only England, but Scotland, Wales or Ireland.

Of the 445 British troops killed since the first American missiles hit Kabul airport 12 years ago, it is in the baking desert of this Afghan province that 398 have died in a long and complicated conflict in an often bewildering country.

There have been many moments when the soldiers there, and the civilians back home, have wearily wondered who is on who’s side.

Heroes: Afghan children greet British soldiers on the outskirts of Lashkar Gar in the embattled Helmand Province

But those now stationed in Afghanistan were still shocked to learn the country’s president was seemingly not on their side after all.

‘They commit their violations against our sovereignty and conduct raids against our people,’ President Hamid Karzai said shortly before I arrived in Helmand earlier this month. The fruits of the West’s costly battle had been no more than ‘suffering and loss of life and no gains because the country is not secure’.

For those on the ground, such claims are an insult to the memory of their killed or wounded comrades. It is a portrayal that needs correcting, particularly as Karzai is in London this week for talks with David Cameron and his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif.

‘How does that sound to those who have lost somebody?’ Captain Lindy Haywood said of the Afghan president’s statements. ‘We’ve left the country in a better state than when we got here.’



She was not alone in her outrage. At Britain’s Helmand HQ, Camp Bastion, servicemen enthusiastically described the progress made. Many of them had done multiple tours.

This was not the perspective of some mere six-month posting. This was the insight of people who know exactly how bad things really had been.

Whether the cause is just or the price too high is a matter of personal judgement, but they were insistent that in Helmand much has been bought with British ‘blood and treasure’. Something close to normal life has in many parts been restored.

‘It used to be we would have daily contacts,’ Captain Mike Crofts, 28, told me. ‘As soon as we pushed out, they’d hit us.

‘That doesn’t happen now. Our nearby town has hundreds of market stalls. When you see shops open — people happy to go about — that’s a pretty positive indicator, I’d say.’

Each morning, queues of girls can now be seen heading to the classroom, some of the 130,000 children in school in Helmand. Back in 2001 there were none.

The national economy has quadrupled in size, meaning local businessmen and farmers are focused on making money rather than jihad. Infrastructure has been built, including the almost completed highway between Sangin and Kajaki.

Long struggle: But soldiers who spoke to Evgeny Lebedev were insistent that in Helmand much has been bought with British 'blood and treasure'

It is this that makes the nature of the Afghan President’s analysis so mystifying.

The Brits’ commanding officer, Brigadier Rupert Jones, the much-admired son of Falklands war hero Colonel ‘H’ Jones, told how, during his last tour, it would take all day to pass down a stretch of road due to the roadside bombs and constant snipers. Today, it takes a few uneventful minutes.

He told me: ‘The British public are hugely proud of the courage and the sacrifice of the British Armed Forces in Afghanistan. Of that there’s no doubt. What the British public should also be proud of is the achievement, because that courage and sacrifice has been for something. It has been to give this country a chance.’

I have always been fascinated by Afghanistan. Partly it is because I was born in the Soviet Union: as a child in the Eighties, the television news in our family home was filled with images of dead soldiers being brought back from the Soviets’ own Afghan war.

Next year marks not only the withdrawal of British and American troops but, in April, a presidential election to determine Karzai’s successor. What happens in the coming months will define the country’s future.

It is why I had been determined to see the situation for myself. Many of the changes that are to come have already begun.

British and American troops have pulled back from front-line duties, leaving the Afghan military to take the lead in combat operations.

The Afghan army, though, has major flaws. There is a lack of equipment, widespread illiteracy, and even drug abuse, with both marijuana and heroin consumed by Afghan soldiers on duty with alarming regularity.

Yet, during this year’s fighting season, the Afghan army bore the brunt when the Taliban launched its offensive and — slightly to the surprise of their British and American advisors — stood up to the challenge.

The casualties might have been shockingly high, and many of the gains short-term in nature, but it seems the years of training may have created something along the lines of a functioning force after all.

‘The average Afghan wants fundamentally the same things that all of our families want,’ Brigadier Jones explained. ‘They want peace and stability and they want to be able to generate a livelihood to be able to look after their family.

‘That’s a pretty simple desire and the bulk of them recognise the role the Afghan security forces are trying to play in supporting that future.’

He watched Afghan forces sweep through Sangin district this summer.

‘They cleared through exceptionally well-defended enemy positions that had been held by the insurgents for six years, and went through in a matter of hours operating in a way that the British Army would, frankly, be proud of.

‘They were bringing together indirect artillery fire, direct fire — all the bits that you pull together in a complex battle. It was impressive.’

Taking the lead: Soldiers of the Afghan National Army are now bearing the brunt of combat operations, but the force is beset by problems including illiteracy, drug abuse and a lack of equipment

In Kabul, I went to see President Karzai to try to understand for myself what had led him to make such a public outburst.

Each morning, his working day begins by signing chits for the families of every Afghan killed in the previous 24 hours.

This helps explain why, as he put it, he was so ‘angry’ at the continued loss of life and so damning of the British and American military efforts that have failed to stem it.

In many, many ways Karzai has been good for the country — a president who has sought to instil the democratic process. Preparations for next year’s presidential election are on schedule, with some 16 candidates confirmed as running.

Most importantly, he never once sought to challenge the constitutional limits which restrict him to serving just two terms — for which, whatever one’s view on the successes, failures and controversies of his time in office, he certainly deserves credit.

There is an overwhelming tendency in the West, where I for the most part grew up and went to school, to understand history in terms of forces of good and evil.

Maybe it’s to do with Christianity, maybe it’s the Cold War, or the fairy tales we read as children.

After long centuries in which their land has been the crucible for the world’s most intense conflicts, Afghans know better. There, the kaleidoscope never stops moving. The pieces are always in flux.

It was when Karzai showed me around his presidential palace that I realised it was not just what is happening now but what happened in Afghanistan’s past that has fuelled his suspicion and vitriol.

He pointed out a beautiful 19th-century painted wooden panel showing birds of prey in a tropical paradise. The birds’ heads, I was told, had been covered in black paint when the Taliban took control.

Despite the panel having been restored, traces of black can still be seen. It is a constant reminder of the destructive zealotry of the Taliban’s rule that many Afghans fear could once again consume their country.

The palace itself was built only after Kabul’s old fortress was destroyed by British imperial troops in 1880 at the height of its ‘Great Game’ with the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia. The Americans first helped create the Taliban to fight the Soviet occupation, and then ignored them.

Angry: Evgeny meets Aghan President Hamid Karzai, who said the fruits of the West¿s costly battle in his country had been no more than 'suffering and loss of life and no gains because the country is not secure'

As Karzai points out, the world has long used Afghanistan as a pawn in its own power struggles.

‘Those who helped us fight the Soviet Union were doing it for their own objectives,’ Karzai said.

‘The United States was doing it to defeat the Soviet Union regardless of what happened to us, and the West with it. That’s why all these extremists were brought to Afghanistan from other parts of the world. We suffered the consequences.

‘When the Soviet Union was defeated, the West also withdrew. They felt their work was done here.

‘Now, if they find their interests important here, they will continue. If they don’t find it important as far as their interest is concerned, they will walk away.

‘They are not here for us. They are here for their own interests.’

Mistakes haven’t helped.

For example, there have been the wedding parties that have been accidentally bombed; villagers wrongly targeted as insurgents, and the inability to stop Taliban supporters and equipment coming across the Pakistan border.

But this is not a zero-sum game.

Even if Britain and America are motivated by nothing other than self-interest, this shouldn’t cheapen the advances such interest has brought.

Britain’s acting ambassador in Kabul, Robert Chatterton Dickson, was honest about what had gone wrong and how things could have been handled far better.

He admits: ‘Attention was distracted by Iraq. An opportunity was given to the Taliban to sort of recreate themselves, which they took. We should probably have started recreating the Afghan national security forces in 2002.’ Of course, it’s what is happening now — not in the recent or far past — which matters.

On the streets of Kabul, I saw market stalls heaving with produce. The roads were filled with a mishmash of clapped-out old cars, new saloons and donkeys pulling wooden carts. In a park, young families enjoyed the sunshine.

There was every sign, as Brigadier Jones had put it, of life being lived.

That was definitely not the case in 2001. Back then, the Taliban exerted control through beheadings and judicial amputations. They reduced women to chattels — publicly flogging them if seen with a man who was not a relative. Enemy prisoners were left to die in shipping containers left out in the sun.

Since then, their sadism has included skinning a man alive, and forcing a man to watch his wife being repeatedly raped. It is a campaign of civil terror.

Notices are left in mosques that makes clear anyone working with the Afghan government or foreign troops will be executed.

Taliban guerilla fighters: The group exerted control in Afghanistan through beheadings and other barbarity

To me, these are symptoms of a relatively modern ideology — one which blends politics and religion — which has been dubbed ‘Islamofascism’.

When a radical state seeks to draw its legitimacy from Allah alone, what obligation does it have to its people? It operates by divine right — a throwback to the times when absolute power was claimed in the West by medieval kings.

It is no consolation to the victims of Taliban thuggery that the perpetrators of such horrors believe they are acting with celestial sanction.

They are wrong, of course.

The disgusting villains and brutes who brought beggary and butchery to the beautiful lands of Afghanistan are servants of an ideological cancer which could end up killing the body of thought and practice whence it came — Islam. Some people used to call this a clash of civilisations.

I think of it as a battle between the modern and medieval mind, which confronts each of us with a stark choice. I know which side I am on.

But in such a battle, it would be wrong to imagine British troops have died merely to stop things falling apart.

The disgusting villains and brutes who brought beggary and butchery to the beautiful lands of Afghanistan are servants of an ideological cancer

In Afghanistan, a structure of fair governance has been built which, if it can hold, offers real promise and hope for the future. But for that to happen, Afghanistan must not be left to standby itself.

However, as yet, the country’s military is not competent or equipped enough. It still does not have one proper combat aircraft. Nor is its economy able to cope with the cost of defending itself.

The army’s £4 billion annual budget is in itself twice the government’s entire tax revenue.

When the Soviets pulled out in 1989, it was widely presumed that the regime they left would quickly collapse. It didn’t. It survived for three years as Russian troops continued to provide large-scale military support and the security forces they had created stepped in to continue on their own the fight for their survival.

It was only when the financial plug was pulled as the USSR imploded that the Afghan government crumbled, causing the then president to flee to Kabul’s UN compound from which he was eventually dragged by the Taliban and his castrated and mutilated body hung from a traffic pylon.

Senior British officials point to last year’s Nato summit on Afghanistan in Chicago as proof of the West’s long-term commitment, even after the bulk of troops return home. Billions of dollars of support was promised and Nato troops committed to advise, train and assist the Afghan security forces.

Let’s hope that in London this week, it is made clear that those promises will be kept.

If they are not, the sacrifice by those British soldiers will be just as much in vain as it was by the Soviet ones who, during my childhood, I saw make the journey home from Afghanistan in their coffins.