-Caveat Lector-
The Sunday Times (of London)
September 23 2001 TERRORISM
Tom Carew, an SAS soldier who helped turn Afghanistan's fighters into an
effective modern guerrilla force, on the daunting task facing allied
troops in the air or on the ground
My life with the mujaheddin
When you're wounded and left,
On Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out,
To cut up your remains,
Just roll on your rifle,
And blow out your brains,
And go to your Gawd,
Like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling, *Gunga Din*
We were there to assess the Afghan fighting capability and to retrieve
Soviet equipment. It was 1980, the Russians had just invaded and the
Afghans were fighting a superpower with the same tactics they had used
against the British before the first world war. Watching them fight was
like watching an old western: the Russian cowboys would come into a valley
and down would stream the Afghan Indians. My task was to teach the Afghans
modern guerrilla tactics. Without them, they would be exterminated.
I tried to go without preconceptions, but it was hard. Before leaving
Britain, everyone told me to be careful. The Afghans are barbaric, they'll
chop you up, they said.
My boss at MI6 gave me a Flashman novel about a cowardly British officer
in the first British Afghan war of 1839-42. It was full of knife-wielding
maniacs who carved up British soldiers. After a few months adjusting,
however, I found the Afghans to be very pleasant. We got along. I
respected their bravery; they respected the way I instructed them.
I had much more difficulty coping with the terrain. When I arrived in
Peshawar, an Afghan military leader warned me: "I hope you are fit, my men
march very quickly." No problem, I thought, I was used to marching. But my
God: up, up, up we went. We entered the Hindu Kush mountains and started
climbing. Above 10,000ft the oxygen started to thin and my concentration
to lapse. The Afghans were used to it. There was only one thing we had
over them: most of them couldn't swim, which made crossing lakes and
streams tricky.
As fighting terrain, Afghanistan is a nightmare. It's a natural fortress.
You can't get far with vehicles - you get bogged down, and the passes are
too steep. Laden infantry troops could take five days to reach a
beleaguered outpost, a journey that would take a helicopter 20 minutes.
The Russians, consequently, had an awful time. It's one thing to put in
your infantry, but you've got to keep them within range of your artillery.
With difficult mountain passes, this is almost impossible.
None of this matters to the Afghans: they have it all organised, moving
from one village to the next, where they have stocks of food. This is how
they have fought and won wars for 200 years, with little bases all over
the place and holes in the ground where everything is buried. This allows
them to carry as little as possible and to cover ground much faster than a
western force could.
We didn't use tents, we lived in caves or slept rough. Most of the army
carried just a weapon, three magazines of ammunition and some nan bread,
all wrapped in a shawl on their back. No western soldier could carry heavy
equipment and keep up with them.
For a foreign army, establishing a supply route would be very difficult.
To try to carry food and water up those mountains, some of which are
13,000ft high, would be madness. You have to carry bottled water and each
gallon weighs 10lb. On some days, we were going through two to three
gallons. A soldier in those hills is going to burn 4,000-5,000 calories a
day. You need high-calorie rations and the Afghans can live on a lot less.
And, of course, there is the weather. Towards the end of this month,
winter starts setting in. It begins with rain, then it freezes, then it
snows. By mid-October the snow will be up to neck height. A journey that
takes three days in summer will take 10 days in winter - and of course in
snow you leave tracks. The freezing conditions rule out helicopter
support, and the mist in the valleys invites crashes.
The Afghan fighters know the mountains as well as a Welsh farmer knows his
hills. I heard someone suggest last week that the ground could be covered
by putting in a series of four-man teams. That idea is ridiculous. The
Hindu Kush is a vast expanse. What can a four-man team do that you can't
do with a satellite? Never mind a needle in a haystack; it's like a needle
in Wembley stadium.
Besides, a western taskforce will stick out like a sore thumb. Most of the
Afghan fighters wear sandals soled with old car-tyre treads - the ones I
was given to wear were crippling. This means a western bootprint is
instantly trackable.
Once identified, the Russian soldiers were sitting targets. We trained the
Afghans in "shoot and scoot"; they would lay a little ambush, let rip and
disappear. They picked it up quickly. Before long, they had learnt to let
the Russian convoys get halfway up a pass and then blow a hole through
their middle. The lucky ones died instantly. The unlucky ones were chopped
to pieces in the aftermath. In the Hindu Kush, don't expect to appeal to
the Geneva convention.
Other training procedures we put them through included marksmanship,
tactical movement, training with weapons, anti-tank weapons and
anti-aircraft missiles. The Americans had been keen we teach them urban
terrorism tactics too - car bombing and so on - so that they could strike
at Russians in major towns. Personally, I wasn't prepared to do that,
although I realised that eventually they would find someone who was.
The Taliban don't have much in the way of weapons. When I arrived, all
they had were old 303s, sniper rifles, and some bolt-action guns. They
weren't used to semi-automatics, very few had Kalashnikovs, only those
they had captured from the Soviets or that had been presented to them by
the many deserters from the Afghan puppet regime's conscript army.
Now, of course, they are more sophisticated, but a lot of weapons won't
have been upgraded since the Russian war. They might have a few Stingers
left - one of the best shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles. But whether
they're serviceable is debatable: weapons maintenance is virtually zero,
many left to lie around in the heat and dust so they were rusting beyond use.
They do have a lot of old ZSU-23s, one of Saddam Hussein's favourite
weapons. It's a three-barrel, 50-calibre machinegun, usually arranged in
groups of two, three or four. It has a range of about 4,000 yards, so if
you're coming in on a helicopter and have four of these blasting away at
you from the back of Toyota pick-ups, it's devastating.
Then there are the landmines. In the early 1980s the Afghans cleared a
buffer zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan - an area equal to four days'
walk - then put in observation posts on the high ground and mined it all.
Everything that entered the area was obliterated and it is possible that
the ground is still mined.
As for the composition of the army, back in the 1980s most of the men were
17-24 years old. In some ways, the Afghan soldiers were no different from
young men everywhere and there was great camaraderie. One thing that
struck me, though, was their discipline and motivation: they never
complained, they got on with it.
As time went by I began to realise that this stemmed from their respect
for their commander: there was no officer-soldier gap, they all mucked in
together, but their respect was absolute. Their discipline was hardly ever
relaxed - they might occasionally smoke opium (much of which was being
cultivated and smuggled to fund the war), but for religious reasons they
wouldn't drink. They would get up at first light for prayers and cover
some distance before the sun came up. They would stop five times a day for
prayer, although never during battle - fortunately the Koran says that in
combat you are excused prayers. But they always prayed afterwards.
They were devout Muslims, but not fanatics. At night sentries would call
out every 30 minutes "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) - this would give away
our position, but then I imagine the Soviets had the same problem with
their Afghan soldiers.
In terms of their efficiency as an army, their biggest problem was the
mullah influence. Because of the doctrine that it is a great honour to die
in a holy war - that from the moment you enrol as a soldier you are in
fact dead, that every day is borrowed time until you die in glory and take
your seat at Allah's right hand - they were fearless and took risks that
western soldiers perhaps would not.
It is, in my opinion, extremely unlikely that Bin Laden is hiding in the
mountains. He must have a base from where he can communicate. He can't
communicate from inside the Hindu Kush. He is more likely to be on the
northwest frontier of Pakistan, a heavily populated area that the West
will be loath to attack. Besides, he will want to be somewhere where he
can see CNN coverage of the attack on America. Most of the Afghan military
leaders I encountered operated from the comfort of Peshawar in Pakistan.
They didn't take part in any fighting, because they wanted to be around
when it was over to reap the benefits.
If it comes to a ground war, I believe the western forces will have a very
slim chance of victory. The last army to win in Afghanistan was Alexander
the Great's.
The Afghans are a formidable enemy and one of the legacies of the war with
Russia was their need to increase the production of opium to pay for it.
Afghanistan is now one of the most important sources of raw material for
the narcotics trade, and the money has been going into somebody's pocket.
I should know: I saw it being grown, smoked and transported.
The other terrible legacy of that war was the military knowhow we gave
them: we in the West pointed them in the right direction and, with a
little bit of training, they went a long way.
Tom Carew served in 16 Parachute Brigade and 22 SAS Regiment. Since
leaving the army he has worked for the US Defence Intelligence Agency and
the US Drug Enforcement Administration. He is also the author of Jihad!
The Secret War in Afghanistan. A version of this article appeared in The
Guardian
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
link: www.sunday-times.co.uk
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