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Showing posts with label Sangin. Show all posts

It is with great sadness, says the Ministry of Defence , that it must confirm that one soldier from 3rd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment (Duke of Wellington's) and one soldier from 2nd Battalion The Rifles have been killed in Afghanistan.

The soldiers died as a result of an explosion that happened whilst on a routine foot patrol, not connected to election security, near Sangin, northern Helmand province, on the morning of Thursday 20 August 2009.

The mincer of Sangin again ... bringing the total deaths in this area to 57 – nearly a third of all British KIAs, and this year to 22, with nineteen of them arising from IEDs.

More on Defence of the Realm.

2009082150200101[i-2009082150200101]An honest reporter Michael Yon certainly is. I do not know how well the elections turned out in other parts of Afghanistan, he writes, but here in North Helmand Provence, near Sangin, I am told that less than 300 people voted.

In this area the day was marked by serious fighting, he tells us. Apache attack helicopters were firing their cannons throughout the day. The howitzers fired many times. The mortars were firing. Various bases were attacked. On the mission I accompanied the snipers were firing. We got into a firefight, and the soldier beside me had his antenna shot off.

Much the same story comes from Anthony Loyd, stationed in Sangin itself. Streaked with sweat, caked in dust and stinking of cordite, he writes, British soldiers in Sangin spent Afghanistan's election day defending their main base in the town from almost ceaseless Taleban assaults.

By the time polls closed and the final echoes of air strikes, artillery and gunfire died away, he tells us, barely 500 Afghans had managed to vote in a district of 70,000 people, a number signifying victory for the Taleban's power of fear and intimidation.

"It’s a bad day," Sangin's governor told Loyd. This was Haji Faisal Haq, glowering in anger as the polls closed to the rattle of machinegun fire. "My people were not able to come out and vote. I would never wish a day like this upon them again." "I can't say how they feel about it," he adds, as the deep-throated rip of A-10 cannon fire cut the sky above him. "I don't even know how I feel about it yet."

Nevertheless, Yon refuses to characterise this as a failure of the elections. It was a local setback. We saw the same in Iraq in early 2005, where some people boycotted the elections. The situation here is not good, but this is only one area of Afghanistan. I do not know what happened elsewhere, he concludes.

No such doubts trouble the BBC's Caroline Wyatt, based in Lashkar Gah. Although part of a convoy transporting Helmand governor Gulal Mangal, which suffered an IED and rocket attack, she happily reports: "Violence fails to deter Afghans", adding to the earlier, ludicrous report proclaiming: "Afghan poll hailed a success".

These bizarre reports from the BBC, topping up its refusal to publish any details of the shot-down Chinook – a story to which The Daily Telegraph adds – puts the state broadcaster out on its own in the British media.

AFG+election[i-AFG+election]The Guardian tells us that the Taleban's campaign of violence to disrupt the elections "appeared to have succeeded in discouraging voter turnout in the militant south." Throughout the day, the paper says, Taleban fighters launched sporadic rocket, suicide and bomb attacks that closed scores of election sites. Other polling stations saw only a trickle of voters.

As election officers began the formidable task of counting votes, Afghan government officials said the Taleban had "launched 73 attacks in 15 provinces during the voting, killing at least 26 Afghan civilians and members of the security forces." Only then are we told that, "Despite the violence, president Hamid Karzai – who is hoping for re-election – declared the poll a success."

It seems that Kandahar, the country's second largest city and the Taleban's spiritual home, was one of the worst affected locations: turnout there was estimated to be down 40 percent on the numbers seen voting in 2004's election. Constant rocket attacks had largely discouraged voters. Across the country election officials suggested turnout could be 40-50 percent of the country's 15 million registered voters.

Ben Farmer, based in Kabul, writes for The Daily Telegraph, citing a "western diplomat" who estimated turnout in some parts of the south as low as 10 percent though "average to good" in the north.

A colonel in the Afghan army said voting in the southern border province of Paktika had been confined to town centres. In Helmand, an observer said voting was well below levels seen in the previous presidential election. Zabul, another Pashtun province, was described as "eerily quiet" by one monitor.

Another eye witness, Norine MacDonald, was live blogging for the Afpak Foreign Policy website. She had spent a day touring polling stations. In each she had asked the officials whether the turnout had been at the level they were expecting. All said no, they were overstaffed. Disastrously, the number of women voting was only 25 to 35 percent of the male count, and – confirming the accounts of other witnesses - she conveyed the view from her staff, that in the south that voter turnout had been low and female turnout very low.

Of course, we weren't "there", so we cannot possibly vouch for the truth of what has been going on. But it is also true to say that no one was "there" in the sense that they were able to be physically present in every city, town and village. We are all relying, to a greater or lesser extent, on second-hand reports in order to assess the big picture.

From these emerge a picture totally odds with that presented by the BBC, its view shared only by an increasingly delusional officialdom, stretching from Kabul to London and Washington.

And it is far from over. Andrew Wilder, an Afghanistan expert at the Tufts International Center in Medford, Mass, cautions that it's too early to judge if the elections were a relative success or failure.

Wilder sees the security questions as secondary to the fraud finger-pointing likely to come. "Election day is not really when we should expect the most problems," he says.

light+gun[i-light+gun]He points out that most of the fraud that marred the 2005 presidential election occurred after the polls had closed. "In 2005, parliamentary election day went really smoothly but the real delegitimisation of the election happened during the counting process," he reminds us.

Yet still, on this flawed process, the Western states of the coalition are basing their optimism about the future of Afghanistan. That view can be about as reliable as the BBC reports, which have sunk to a new nadir of corrupt, biased inadequacy. Caroline Wyatt and her fellow BBC hacks may delude themselves that they are reporting "fairly and accurately" but they, like our government, are only deluding themselves.

The last word, however, must go to an artilleryman in besieged Sangin, interviewed by Anthony Loyd. "It's a good day for us," he remarks happily. "It's what we became soldiers for - to shoot at people shooting at us. Beats getting blown up anyway."

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The four-strong crew were picked up, unhurt, by another Chinook immediately after the incident, north of Sangin, but the machine had to be destroyed by an air strike "to prevent it falling into Taleban hands."

UPDATE: It is now confirmed by the MoD that the aircraft was shot down - a combination of "RPG and small-arms fire". More on Defence of the Realm.

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HQUKTF20090720059[i-HQUKTF20090720059]In March 2007, soldier turned journalist Anthony Loyd thought the war in Afghanistan was "winnable". The tide was turning against the Taleban, he wrote.

That was from a man who was "there" and we all accord great respect to those knowing figures who have "been there", as able to divine from their very presence all there is to know about the region they happen to visit.

Well, Anthony Loyd is back "there", in Sangin actually, where on the eve of the presidential election he is reporting the official view that: "Helmand locals too scared of Taleban to vote in presidential election".

There was little to show yesterday, he writes, for the copious expenditure of British money, bullets and blood over the past three years in Sangin. With less than 24 hours to go before the start of voting in Afghanistan's presidential election today the streets were all but empty and the bazaar was, in effect, closed.

Driving through the middle of town with a combined patrol from 3 Company, Welsh Guards, and the Afghan National Army, he saw only two small children and a man on a motorbike. The centre of Sangin resembled an abandoned film set, with even the nearby ferry, usually a lifeline for locals wishing to cross the Helmand river, beached on the shore, the banks abandoned.

The Taleban, who have launched a concerted campaign of intimidation to close Sangin to anyone wishing to vote, fired a handful of mortar rounds into the town soon after midday as a reminder of their presence. The lazy, jackhammer thumping of an Apache helicopter’s 30mm cannon drifted over the day's singing heat in response. For British troops in Sangin's Forward Operating Base Jackson, the day's events ended with an incoming 107mm rocket and the returning clatter of heavy machinegun fire.

The piece is worth reading in its entirety, so we won't repeat it here. But it should be noted that Loyd acknowledges there has been progress. Soldiers no longer have to fight their way out of the gates, he writes. But they die in greater numbers as a result of bombs placed at the edge of Sangin, he adds.

And, one might add, their supply helicopter got shot down so, in addition to the hurried visits by Chinooks, they have also been supplied by a heavily armed convoy. The picture shows the photographic debut of the Panther in Afghanistan, this one driving through Sangin at the head of a section of that convoy.

From the limited view of the backdrop, this does not immediately strike one as a bustling, peaceful metropolis. It rather fits Loyd's description of the town, even if the photograph was taken some days earlier.

Nor, indeed, are the problems confined to Sangin. At the centre of British power, in Lashkar Gah, according to The Independent, the Taleban are blockading the city, threatening potential voters and mining the roads.

Says the paper, the Helmand provincial governor, Gulal Mangal, hoped 75 percent of the province's 800,000 people would vote. But privately, his staff were more realistic. "We'll be lucky if we get 200,000," said a senior official.

In Kajaki, where British troops are helping on a project which will provide electricity, the Taliban has set up a radio station which broadcasts repeated warnings against voting. In Zabul insurgent commanders have commandeered mosques to threaten dire consequences for the election process.

The coalition and the British government have invested a great deal of political and financial capital in these elections, and the process of preparation has cost us a great deal of blood. It is a big gamble, writes Robert Fox in The Guardian.

Of course, we are not "there", so how can we know anything? But we would be willing to gamble that this could be the last throw of the dice. The interesting thing is that, if such a decision is made, it will be made in London, not Kabul or Sangin. And we were "there" once. I can even tell you that the fire extinguishers in No 10 Downing Street did not conform with EU regulations.

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