The Wrong War by Bing West

Author:Bing West [West, Bing]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-932-1
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

Shalah led his thirty askars back to their barracks. The Afghan soldiers lived in the schoolhouse, bought their food in the local market, and attended to their administrative duties by themselves. Their senior officer flat-out avoided combat, so they relied on Brown and Gallimore to assign combat duties.

The British advisers went their separate way back to their rooms inside Jakar’s half-finished concrete house. There they stripped off their sopping gear, cleaned their weapons, and washed down under a hose connected to a water barrel on the roof. The British army had no school for advisers, assuming instead that any qualified infantry could advise. After all, they had two centuries of experience in Afghanistan.

That experience cut two ways, though. The Brits carried the baggage of having fought two wars against the Pashtuns, whose oral traditions condensed decades and complexities into a simple tale of two parts. First, the Brits had invaded Helmand and were soundly defeated in 1880 at Maiwand. Second, they had returned in 2005 and applied heavy firepower that was bitterly resented. In 2007, besieged at a town called Musa Qala, the British had cut an unfortunate deal to pull out. Later, the town had to be retaken from the Taliban, leading to rumors about serpentine British motives. Many locals resented the British and circulated derogatory gossip. As a result, the British carried a heavy political as well as military load in Helmand.

“I was in Helmand in ’07,” Gallimore said. “We didn’t have many men, so in the fights we called in too much air. That tainted us. The U.S. Marines are a welcome addition. We both like to fight, and now neither of us will have to use heavy firepower. In the U.S., the military is admired. In the U.K., we get sympathy—the ‘poor you’ treatment. Our press portrays us as puppets fighting America’s war. Rubbish. We British are fighters and proud of it.”

During the firefights at Jakar, the Brits as advisers had acted as the key shooters and the commanders. That was the case also in many U.S. units. The word “partner” was used in a universal sense to indicate that coalition and Afghan soldiers worked together. In practice there were a hundred variations of partnering. A habit takes about twelve weeks to set in. After three or four months, the tactical habits of askars improved simply by moving with American soldiers in the field. When the Taliban engaged, the Americans took the lead.

Placing the askars in the lead meant counseling and coaching the Afghan officers. This was a job for a professional adviser who was tactically sound, brave, tactful, patient, and skilled in communicating. Finding all those characteristics in warriors who are Type A personalities is tough. The Army and Marine Special Forces were by far the best advisers, but there were few of them. The Army Special Forces course was twenty-four months and the Marine fourteen months. The acceptance rate into both forces was low.

Thus the British, the Marines, and the Army all tapped soldiers like Gallimore and Brown and said, “For the next several months, you are advisers.

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