Joint Force Harrier by Adrian Orchard & Adrian Orchard & James Barrington

Author:Adrian Orchard & Adrian Orchard & James Barrington [Adrian Orchard and James Barrington]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141889757
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

15

I pulled back on the throttle as I headed east back to Kandahar. As the RPM dropped I scanned the cockpit instruments, my eyes ranging, almost unconsciously, over displays recording temperatures or pressures, fuel and electrical systems. No cause for alarm. And as I descended I looked down from the Harrier’s big glass cockpit. As always, it amazed me just how spectacularly beautiful Afghanistan is from the air, even if that beauty is rather harder to discern on the ground. It’s a country that runs the gamut of both terrain and climate, from the highest to the lowest extremes of both.

Immediately to the south of the airfield is the Red Desert, which, when the sun is rising or setting, is blood-red. From the air, in certain lighting conditions, it looks like a crimson sea – quite extraordinary. In the desert there are sharp and craggy rock features – almost aggressive in their appearance – surrounding the very few small clumps of habitation.

The Helmand River runs down the Kandahar Valley, flanked on each side by a strip of productive arable land that follows the valley all the way down and within which stand most of the district’s dwellings. Scattered around the edge of this area are large numbers of circular holes, almost like bomb craters, but in fact these holes have been caused by a much less dramatic force than high explosive. They’re actually a sequence of unsuccessful drill holes made by the Afghans as they searched for water.

As you fly north the terrain gets even more spectacular with mountains rising from the plains to ever-increasing heights as they ascend towards the Hindu Kush, the formation that extends well out beyond Afghanistan and up into the Himalayas, rising to 25,000 feet, and all the way down to Kandahar in the south. It then runs even further south towards Pakistan and west to the Iranian border of the Red Desert. Just south of Kandahar Airfield there is a sheer cut-off of this geological feature. This is marked by the range of unmistakable red sand dunes that run as far as the eye can see, before the land rises up to form the mountains that extend all the way down to Pakistan.

The difference between the mountains and the lowlands – which are actually quite high as the desert there is at some 3,000 feet until it starts to descend towards the border with Pakistan – is stark, especially in the winter. At that time of year the mountains are covered in snow and the temperature on the peaks is well below zero Celsius even during the day, but it will still be very hot in the high desert, with virtually no rainfall.

The landscape was extreme and spectacular, especially when the sun caught it towards the evening. Further north, from the Kandahar area and the Panjwayi Valley into the Helmand Valley and River, the land rose quite quickly into steep-sided north–south valleys and then further into the high mountain area, where the Taliban usually retreated in the winter to regroup.

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