Commando by Monty Halls

Author:Monty Halls [Halls, Monty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473533165
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2022-04-07T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

For Those in Peril

‘Heroin is the illicit drug most highly associated with a single source: some 90 per cent of the world’s heroin comes from opium grown in just a few provinces in Afghanistan.’

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) ‘The Globalization of Crime’ Report 2010

It is a sobering thought that the vast majority of the surface of the planet is an unregulated wilderness. The great shimmering expanse of the oceans is unpoliced, ungoverned, open to exploitation, and represents the last untamed frontier. What happens beyond the curved blue horizon is seldom seen, although one can rest assured that much of it smacks of either desperation or ruthlessness. It has been this way since men first took to the sea in boats.

Piracy and smuggling are not, however, some quaint historic irrelevance or a throwback to distant times. They are real, viable threats to any traveller of the open ocean today, particularly along some of the more notorious maritime trade routes. Although the presence of warships and aircraft is a significant deterrent to those operating illegally at sea, there is no substitute for boarding a suspect vessel.

To be truly effective, such boardings should be undertaken at speed, with aggression and expertise, and allow no room for evasion or resistance. And it is in these particular skills that Royal Marines excel.

The smuggling routes around the world are more than simple arteries enabling the passage of illegal goods from A to B. They are part of a wider ecosystem, one that spans continents and shapes economies, brokering genuine power in the process. Although as physical routes they exist to source and distribute contraband, they also create vital funds to support terrorism and other criminal activity. To see smuggling and piracy as isolated issues that do not affect wider society is a grave error of judgement.

Never is this more apt than for the opium that travels into the world from ‘The Golden Crescent’ – Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. As Ahmed Rashid noted in Fundamentalism Reborn?, ‘The cross-border smuggling trade has a long history, but never has it played such an important strategic role as under the Taliban.’

For the Royal Marines boarding teams operating in the Gulf in the mid-2000s, this link was of particular significance. The Taliban fighters who battled with British forces in Helmand Province did so using funds from an opiate trade that brought in $4 billion to an otherwise destitute nation. The vast bulk of opium production in the country (89 per cent) takes place in only nine southern and western regions. One is Helmand Province, the British area of operations throughout the war in Afghanistan. In 2013 alone British Forces operating with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) destroyed 31 facilities producing heroin in this region.

For the Commandos that patrolled the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Gulf region during this period, the explosives that made up the IEDs in Helmand, and the bullets that tore the flesh of their colleagues, were paid for by the supply chains that their boarding activities sought to disrupt.

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