When reports first started circulating in Kabul that Britain was preparing to send troops to this desert province in the Pashtun south, many people had to look up where it was. A day’s drive from the capital, none of my Afghan colleagues had ever been there. A British colonial army was defeated in the region in 1880. More than 120 years later, few officials in London knew anything about that history, or that of southern Afghanistan. Why was Britain going back?
The simple answer was a commitment made by Prime Minister Tony Blair to contribute to NATO’s expansion across the south, to bolster the Afghan government. As different provinces were divvied up between alliance members, with colonial overtones, the UK opted for Helmand. It was also about narcotics. Britain was the so-called ‘lead nation’ tackling the Afghan drugs trade, and Helmand was the lead opium-growing province. The idea was to bring in development specialists as well as soldiers, to build up the government’s capacity. But it was also about the UK’s relationship with the United States.
After their joint invasion, Britain’s occupation of southern Iraq had not gone well. Its troops had started off in 2003 patrolling in berets, their commanders confident that they could apply their experience of counter-insurgency warfare in Northern Ireland, where they spoke the language, to the sun-roasted streets of Basra, where they didn’t.
