SANGIN - A Glance through Afghan Eyes by Toby Woodbridge

Author:Toby Woodbridge [Woodbridge, Toby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907556036
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11 – Friends All Around and the Enemy Within

As mentor trust plays a crucial part in your work, and will often be central to the achievement of success or otherwise. It has two faces. From the moment you undertake to train and advise a group not your own you must seek to establish their trust in you as an individual, someone worthy of the role and therefore deserving of their respect. It is through this respect that they will choose to engage, listen and learn, and ultimately gain from the lessons and advice provided. Then there is the trust you give to them, a trust that is necessarily given freely, without justification and potentially undeserved. It is a calculated risk that you make repeatedly whereby you choose to operate in a manner that best ensures effective working relationships can be formed, developed and maintained, often at the cost of absolute security to yourself and the men directly under your command. A trust based on long-term strategic success rather than immediate personal safety. Of course this can subsequently increase the threat from enemy sympathisers or insurgent infiltrators who will seek to take full advantage of any opportunity to exploit a means of targeting Afghan security forces and coalition troops. As a foreign mentor all you can do is remain vigilant in the application of your own common sense and gut instinct to determine where something seems wrong, and again trust in the majority of well-meaning mentees to cover for the gaps in your local knowledge and experience, and alert you to threats you can never hope to see.

The IED threat within Sangin and its immediate surrounds was so acute that it sometimes felt as if all the land around was one unmarked minefield of highly unstable, densely packed explosives. Only the patrol bases we worked from offered guaranteed respite from the deadly menace concealed in our midst, islands of certainty enveloped by an ocean of mortal danger. The possibility of a direct attack within these camps existed – they weren’t hermetically sealed and it was often necessary to allow local access during the course of each day – but it was a risk we felt able to counter by ensuring vigilance in our guard routines, and the specific threat of an IED strike within any perimeter was not one which should have concerned us unduly when compared to the hugely significant problem they presented beyond the wire. Of course our insurgent foe would continually press for a weakness in any defence we could offer, and in the ANP they had a potential conduit for infiltration which had proven effective on a number of instances across the country. To that end, and applying the oft repeated maxim that says the unexpected brings more risk than that most accepted, it was probably just an unavoidable matter of time before their unknown number of attempts resulted in one very near, almost catastrophic, success.

The incident occurred soon after I returned from leave, and with

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