Oliver Burch's Trout and Grayling Monthly Report - February 2021

Back in Shahrak following the attack, the replacement Taliban garrison was now understandably nervous. The Northern Alliance had retreated a few hours after taking the fort because they feared an airstrike in retaliation. The Taliban then had some old 1960s MIGs at Shindand which would just about fly, although without full aerobatic performance as their pilots had no G suits. But the ground attack could be repeated. Every time I drove out to inspect the programme in one of the other district centres, Taiwara, Passaband or Tulak, I would pass an advance patrol of three or four Taliban soldiers about half a mile out from the fort, armed usually with rocket propelled grenade launchers and straining their eyes into the sun to watch the desert and the hills. Half an hour later, gaining the summit of the first pass away from Shahrak valley, we would come across a single horseman sitting watching the track, his rifle balanced across the pommel of his saddle. This was the Northern Alliance outpost and the sentry would invariably fish for information despite our white vehicle and fluttering blue flag: “Are there any Taliban down there?” To that we couldn’t reply without compromising our neutrality, as he well knew. Muktar would have replied if I had let him.

Well, two Red Cross aircraft did show up at Herat airport the next day. Some young Taliban soldiers by the runway were jeering, but nobody tried to detain us or even check our papers. I was slightly surprised, despite what I knew about pashtunwali and respect for the principle of hospitality; almost any other people in the same circumstances would have held us as hostages. Meanwhile we were all thinking about our Afghan friends and the storm which we knew was coming to the country. The flight to Pakistan was not without incident and ended with flying blind down the Khyber Pass in thick cloud, thunder and lightning, relying on radar. On emerging to the tarmac, I felt on my face the very first drops of rain which had fallen on me since March. It seemed like heaven! 

The mood in Peshawar, which is pretty much an Afghan town, was sizzling hot; Pakistani military security was moving everywhere and the Christian minority was distinctly frightened. Only then, watching television in hotel rooms, did we see what had happened to the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The world had already been watching this for nearly three days now, but films of the collapsing towers were being run again and again by the international news channels and we stared in appalled silence. One particular scene gripped me and still does: firemen checking each other’s breathing apparatus before beginning to climb the stairs. 

Across the world air traffic had been disrupted and a few days were needed to get flights out, firstly to the UK to face the media and for a short leave, to Dublin to brief donors, and then back to Mashad in Eastern Iran to prepare for what came next. In the event there followed long weeks of waiting as Coalition air strikes on Afghanistan went forward. In Western Afghanistan the Taliban behaved as you might expect and dispersed their tanks for protection among the civilian population of Maslakh camp. They also visited aid agency offices in Herat and threatened local staff with death if they should use the satellite phones. But they did not seal the equipment and our own staff used their instrument several times to ask us to intercede with the Iranian government in order to permit the evacuation of themselves and their extended families. More than 100 people were involved and we knew perfectly well there was absolutely no chance of the Iranian government agreeing – we had very little pull in that quarter. Iran, which already had a large illegal Afghan population, was determined to keep refugees at the border (in defiance of the 1951 Refugee Convention) but would provide assistance there. It was not pleasant to deliver the message, but our staff were advised to stay home and keep their heads down.

One morning in the Mashad hotel I was amazed to hear a familiar language over breakfast. It was a group of Serbian drivers who had just convoyed World Food Programme trucks overland from Yugoslavia ready for use in Afghanistan with local drivers. Meanwhile, to my surprise and relief, de-confliction liaison with Coalition air forces to allow convoys of Afghan traders’ trucks to deliver the wheat earned in our summer programmes worked almost perfectly. We fulfilled our contracts, wheat was delivered into the mountains before the snows came and there were no terrible collateral damage accidents with air strikes on the roads. Quite suddenly, or so it seemed, the Taliban were losing territory as the victorious Northern Alliance appeared to sweep across Afghanistan on a rolling front. At least that is how it may have appeared from the outside. In reality what happened is that those local commanders, always making deals on the radio, now saw which way the wind was blowing with American military power intervening, and chose this moment to change sides and declare for the Northern Alliance. And so it was, in the depths of winter, that at last I came back to Herat from Iran via the Tayabad border crossing.

Now with international appeals running we had a much larger aid operation being set up in Herat, new organisations were arriving every day, and together with World Food Programme there was much careful liaison about the distribution of food to different districts. I honestly think we did a reasonably good job to make sure what the real needs were and that nobody was left out. We even air-dropped food packages at one point, although it was not strictly necessary. I went back up to Ghor in the snow and temperatures so cold that vehicle chassis components changed their crystalline structure and cracked, while engines had to be kept idling overnight in an attempt to combat diesel waxing. With a pick and shovel I dug up the computer hard drive from where I had buried it in the compound before I left back in September. Opposition leader Ismail Khan had arrived from his haven in Iran to take over in Herat – he called himself the new “Emir of Western Afghanistan” and there was doubt, for a time, whether he would prove loyal to Kabul. Rory Stewart, then on leave from the Foreign Office, showed up in Herat asking for advice about the road to Ghor, having already walked across Iran and looking now to walk across the centre of Afghanistan to Kabul. For what it was worth, he had a letter of safe conduct from Ismail Khan. “I think that is marvellous; the Great Game goes on,” I teased him. He was very determined and wouldn’t buy a ride on a trader’s truck. Meanwhile the Afghan future was still uncertain and irredentist neighbours were certainly looking to take advantage. There were rumours (never to be realised) of a new asphalt road to be built from the Iranian border to Herat, with accompanying mains electricity to be supplied to the city for the first time in many years. Iran’s road into historic Khorasan would go right on through Ghor to the Shia population in Central Afghanistan. The story that this was to be called the Ayatollah Khomenei Highway may not have been entirely a joke! These were certainly interesting times.

One thing which Ismail Khan did manage to achieve was an accurate count of the beneficiaries in the Maslakh camp, an operation which had always been resisted before by the camp’s inhabitants. Two soldiers were killed during the count, but the final number was 110,000. This was around a third of the originally accepted total, as so many beneficiaries had managed to register themselves for food aid multiple times. So a new registration was undertaken, WFP reduced deliveries accordingly, and later that spring people started to go home to their farms. The wheat market on the edge of camp dried up.  Some, particularly younger ones who had found some type of work around town, inevitably stayed and Maslakh today has become a sort of satellite of Herat city. This is the eventual fate of most refugee camps around the world. For me, the Maslakh story serves as a reminder of how the international aid community can get things so very badly wrong and how the liberal media almost always gets it completely wrong.

Something else was changing, something subtle, but important. Inevitably the enlarged international presence, particularly the international military presence, was having its effect on the population. It wasn’t just the Taliban; most Afghans are uncomfortable with foreign soldiers on their soil. Even the Northern Alliance were working on the assumption that the military occupation would be short. The aid community was not immune from local resentment, and I imagine we had become more visible and were behaving with more self-confidence. I realised that I myself for some reason had taken to wearing European clothes around Herat, where there now seemed to be one international co-ordination meeting after another.  Meanwhile US and other Coalition forces had adopted some of the characteristics of the humanitarian community and were engaged in similar activities, sometimes in plain clothes and of course armed. It was a deliberate policy intended to win hearts and minds, based I think on conclusions drawn from the Americans’ recent peace-keeping experience in the Balkans, and working on the optimistic assumption that they would be applicable everywhere. Secretary of State Colin Powell when addressing a military audience about this time disappointed me by describing NGOs as “the best force multipliers you can have.” One of the US Provincial Reconstruction Teams including officers who had known me in Bosnia arrived in Herat and invited me to lunch. I had to tell them that this situation was different to post-war Bosnia and I didn’t think it would be possible to have close co-operation between the military and humanitarian communities in this case. Where there was co-operation, it should not be visible. In fact I was happier when PRTs, rather than undertaking humanitarian projects, worked on more obviously military matters such as disarmament. The problem was that Afghans were becoming confused about who was a soldier and who was a civilian and both were becoming regarded as valid targets. Without freedom of movement and a level of acceptance by the local population, we couldn’t do our work and we didn’t want a situation where we had to be escorted everywhere. A few days later, the vehicles of the same PRT were fired upon while travelling on the road to Shindand and they responded by calling in a B52 air strike with a smart bomb. This they had every right to do and it certainly solved their problem that afternoon, but it’s hardly possible to subsequently claim neutrality. Nor would it have been an option for us. Within a few months we had a mounting tally of attacks on white vehicles and I had to conclude that the aid operation actually had less freedom of movement than before the international military intervention. Exactly the same problem arose a few years later in Iraq.                 

Afghanistan in my time was commonly described as a failed state, and the harbouring of Al-Qaida and the 9/11 events seen as proof of the threat to the rest of the world which a failed state can be. I saw it as something like England must have been during the Wars of the Roses: a land of king-makers and local power holders, anything but unified. The world knows the history of what has happened in Afghanistan during two decades since. The Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with the ornate stamp which so adorned the visa page of my passport may be over, but the civil war rumbles on. Meanwhile international troops and aid workers with some Afghan patriots somehow hold the situation together while trying to establish a democracy. Local war lords still call the shots in the countryside and the Taliban still have effective control of large swathes of territory. As it turned out, I was to carry on with the Afghanistan emergency relief programmes until a new situation arose in Iraq during the spring of 2003.

I spent a few years of my life engaged in the international “nation-building” system – and it is a system – supposedly in the hope of creating some practical version of democracy in various parts of the world. I am not sure we achieved very much. I’m a believer in emergency relief provided it is well targeted and strictly time-limited, but I’m not so keen on development aid programmes which go on for decades. Nor do I see the value of allocating a fixed percentage of the GDP to international aid work which the responsible government department has difficulty in spending wisely – in fact I welcomed the recent reduction. As a by-product of the work, I gained a kind of insight into the workings and internal politics of the United Nations, the European Union, international humanitarian organisations and other NGOs, the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches, plus a few other strange quangos with political or diplomatic labels.  People like to imagine that such organisations are driven by a shared sense of altruism and responsibility for others. Well, there certainly were a few examples of honest and intelligent altruism, but in my experience ruthless careerism was more often on show and in some cases there was serious corruption. There’s a movie with Ben Kingsley, Back-stabbing for Beginners, which draws the picture quite well and it is not a work of fiction. I concluded a long time ago that if I want to find examples of decent, honourable and intelligent behaviour, the armed forces (of many different countries, not just my own) and the world of business also would be more fruitful places to search. In summary, I was usually more comfortable with soldiers.  

Today the military and civilian spheres are becoming steadily more blurred in sometimes problematic but sometimes interesting ways; every commanding general has a civilian policy adviser and if international forces are present where you are operating, that person is very much worth cultivating. If possible, try to get beyond CIMIC, the civil-military co-operation mechanism usually offered. It’s also very useful to gain the confidence of the officers running the tactical operations centre round the clock along with the J5 planning group. The J2 intelligence people will probably come looking for you. Visibly neutral and impartial as humanitarian organisations should be, such contacts may well need to be private. More difficult, but essential in times of factional armed conflict, you will need avenues of communication with all the local players. Neutrality is a difficult path to tread, but your programmes and beneficiaries, your own people and, last but not least, you yourself will be safer for having those connections.     

Rather naively I just mentioned altruism, but more useful attributes for those planning to work in failed states are a healthy dose of scepticism and a street-wise attitude. Field officers become accustomed to hearing an awful lot of lies from the authorities they are negotiating with and will certainly need to work hard to keep their projects honest. When the local mafia thugs are in charge, as is usually the case in times of war, aid money tends to be the only money in town. You can frequently find yourself in some kind of Mexican stand-off, and in one of those “who blinks first” situations the threat to withdraw the programme and take the money elsewhere is the one effective sanction. Remember that even the mafia would rather have an honest programme than no programme at all. These are situations which international, rather than national, staff of humanitarian organisations find easier to deal with. You won’t have to live in that place for the rest of your life. Again on the subject of altruism, I used to think that humanitarian organisations were getting an unreasonably easy ride when it came to public opinion at home – there was this assumption that everything we were doing must be wonderful. Along with other humanitarian representatives, on a number of occasions I gave evidence about the reconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq to parliamentary select committees and it was oddly disconcerting to note that MPs seemed to hang on our every word rather than question with any rigour what we had to tell them. Politicians and particularly government ministers would get much rougher cross-examination treatment when giving evidence to committees. All that changed when the sexual misconduct of some staff of one British NGO came to light a while ago – the higher the pedestal, the harder they fall! All we really found out then was that humanitarian organisations are staffed by human beings too.   

On a broader and even more pessimistic note, on a global scale what a mess the human species makes of almost everything we do, including relations amongst our own tribes and with almost every natural thing around us! Which is the worst aspect of it; the way we treat each other or the way we treat the environment? (Am I at risk of becoming one of what Tom McGuane called “the bleeding heart walking wounded of the ecology movement?” Or has it taken me 70 years to figure out what little Greta Thunberg already seems to know?) In more serious moments, I sometimes wonder how much of a success homo sapiens is going to be turn out to be, in the not too distant future at that. It’s difficult to deny that the world would be a much better place if the human population was, say, half of what it actually is today. Difficult to deny it, but slightly dangerous to say it unless you are David Attenborough. These are glum thoughts for a father and grandfather to be having, but it would not be so impossible to imagine a future in which we are no longer present. In which case, I think that it would be nice to imagine the storks will still migrate over the mountains of Central Asia and indeed salmon still migrate up European rivers. It would be something at least if we can manage to minimise our impact on other species while we are here - don’t get up gentlemen, we’re just passing through.

Well, that was a story for you of Afghanistan, land of the high flags. Old men like to tell stories; it’s our great fault. And lockdown, I’m afraid, gives us over-much time for retrospection and reflection.  

Stay safe!

Oliver Burch 

Wye Valley Fishing