Akhundzada’s ouster came just months before the Taliban’s deliberate 2006 offensive into Helmand, led in full force by Mullah Dadullah Lang in February. In spite of a greater Coalition presence—forces grew with the deployment of British troops in April 2006, and by late 2007 they numbered seven thousand soldiers—the Taliban made serious inroads. The insurgency was soon strong enough that British forces were challenged to move outside of the network of small bases they had established. Many were essentially besieged inside sandbagged outposts the Taliban had surrounded with a “reef” of mines and improvised booby traps that made simply leaving base time-consuming and treacherous. Intentions to establish an “Afghan development zone” around Lashkar Gah and Gereshk were frustrated. Among the last places taken by the insurgency, in August 2008, was Marjah. It was rumored that Abdul Rahman Jan, seeking to discredit the new governor and give cause to bring back his patron Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, had let his district fall to the Taliban.
While the Taliban had grown stronger, their strength throughout the province derived more from the poor character of existing governance than the appeal of their narrative. In the areas they took over, the Taliban eased the population back into their rule, allowing music and dogfighting again, and looking the other way when men went without turbans and a beard. Dadullah’s ranks swelled as he gained local recruits in the districts that fell under his sway. He and the insurgency were able to leverage a natural xenophobia and some religious extremism. But for many the motivation for supporting the insurgency was to resist the Kabul government, whose face in Helmand had been that of the Akhundzada clan. We believed that if we could address the underlying problems of predatory governance and corruption, we could help establish secure zones along the Helmand River valley.
That summer, as we introduced new forces in a widened effort, we did so fully cognizant that ISAF’s track record in Helmand was unimpressive. Both conventional and special operations forces had successfully targeted the insurgents. But many operations had inflicted damage on homes and caused civilian casualties, unintentionally undermining our effort. We intended that future operations would be different by including a robust Afghan component, having enough manpower to maintain areas once they were secured, and offering a more effective program of creating governance free of warlords.
The strategy was neither new nor guaranteed to work. It was a version of the “ink spot” approach French General Lyautey made famous in Madagascar and Morocco and one often adopted in counterinsurgency campaigns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The concept called for providing secure zones inside which the population could be protected, governed, and allowed to conduct economic activity free from insurgent pressure. The theory held that as people were free to live their lives, this would enhance the government’s legitimacy and strength. And as these domains of government control expanded—like inkblots seeping on a page—they would conjoin. The United States’ counterinsurgency doctrine, which outlined the steps of “clear, hold, and build,” was a manifestation of this approach. That summer, we added “sustain” as a fourth tenet. Success in counterinsurgency was less dependent upon the brilliance of the strategy—the concept is not that hard to understand—than it was on the execution. Counterinsurgency is easy to prescribe, difficult to perform.
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In order to gain a sense of the early stages of the fight in Helmand Province, on June 25 I visited the British soldiers of the Black Watch who had been the first into Babaji. Standing in a damaged compound they’d cleared and were now using as a temporary base, I met with these soldiers and their leaders. With wisps of smoke, the aftereffects of combat, floating through the air, they told how, in the scorching heat of the Afghan summer, they and their comrades had methodically cleared compounds of insurgents and countless IEDs buried beneath the dirt or built into the mud walls of homes and alleyways. Their dead and wounded, more than one hundred men, had been evacuated. But after only several days of fighting, even the unwounded gathered around me looked gaunt and weary, their matted hair blanched and skin yellowed from the film of sand clinging to it. And this was early in their current six-month tour in Afghanistan.