© RUSI JUNE 2008 VOL. 153 NO. 3 pp. 46–50

DOI: 10.1080/03071840802249588

The example of Musa Qaleh, in Helmand
Province, Afghanistan, provides a vivid
illustration of a new, progressive
approach taken by British forces,
addressing many previous failings of the
Afghan counter-insurgency. The task is
simple: hearts and minds must be won,
and rule of law and governance – the
writ of the Afghan state – extended over
the area. But there are many problems.
The very presence of the forces, Afghan
and British, necessary to keep order and
the Taliban out, intimidates the local
population. Infrastructure is dire, posing
logistical challenges. And foreign troops
operate within a complex indigenous
culture that is difficult to penetrate yet
of which they must be extremely
sensitive. Imposing solutions and policies
that sound good in national capitals will
lead to failure if they do not fit easily
with local reality.

For the majority here in the United

Kingdom, the ongoing struggle in
Afghanistan is a simple one of
eradicating the Taliban by military force.
The reality is much more complex, and
what has now been accepted is that
long-term success will only be achieved
if the battle for political influence is won.
Yet for all our good intentions, this is not
something that any foreign power can
easily achieve, least of all those from the
West. Fortunately, however, there has
recently been something of a sea-change
in approach. New doctrine and policy –
not least the introduction of the Tactical
Conflict Assessment Framework (TCAF) –
is helping British and NATO forces to
counteract some of their inherent
disadvantages and to combat the
insurgency not just with bullets, but by
implementing the right kind of
stabilisation and redevelopment that will

win the long-term consensus of the
population.

Before taking a more detailed look at

some of these new approaches, however,
it is worth making a brief assessment of
the situation in Helmand from the point
of view of those living in that troubled
corner of the world. Back when the
Taliban held Musa Qaleh as one its
strongholds in the north of the province,
the town, outwardly at any rate, looked
much as it had done for years – a rather
shabby, down-at-heel settlement of
concrete and mud buildings perched on
the banks of a wide wadi. For the civilian
population, there could be no doubting
who ran the place, yet to the casual
observer there were comparatively few
signs that this was a place under military
control of any kind.

All this changed in December last

year, when the Afghan National Army
(ANA) along with their British and
American NATO partners, won a
spectacular victory and ousted the
Taliban from the town. Immediately, it
was swarming with troops.

Admittedly, it was Afghan troops that

first entered Musa Qaleh in the wake of
the fleeing Taliban, and it remains the
case that the ANA still have a strong
presence there. It is also true, however,
that most of the ANA soldiers are not
from Helmand but from other corners of
Afghanistan, a country that has always
been a geographical concept rather than
a culturally and politically unified nation.
And despite the part played by the ANA,
the British and NATO effort there is a
considerable one, and most town
residents believe it is the latter who hold
the power strings.

When the author visited the town in

January, the military presence was

James Holland is the author of

Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-

1943, Together We Stand and

Italy’s Sorrow: a Year of War 1944-45.

The Way Ahead in Afghanistan

James Holland

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overwhelming. A helicopter landing site
had been built next to the compound,
with the ubiquitous HESCO walls, razor
wire and watch towers. But beyond the
perimeter, running along the north-east
bank of the wadi, were a number of
thirty year-old willows – trees that were
in the line of fire of those guarding the
landing site – and so they were being
felled.

Salim Mohammed, the owner of the

willows, was not entirely happy about
this enforced felling, despite the
compensation that would be given to
him. There was also a notable caution in
his attitude towards the new power in
Musa Qaleh. When asked what life had
been like here in Musa Qaleh before the
Afghan and NATO forces had taken the
town, he replied matter-of-factly, ‘We
had security, and no corruption.’

He is not alone in this view. Helmand

has been for many years, and remains,
the most violent province in the country,
the heart of Afghanistan’s narcotics
trade. The pawns in this mayhem have
been the Helmand people who have
suffered much over the past thirty years:
Russian occupation, bullying and brutal
warlords, civil war and in recent years,
considerable fighting. Life is cheap here.

were quick to point out, is only a short-
term scheme; what will happen to its
workers once it is dropped is not clear.
Certainly, there will be no heroin trade to
go back to. Eradication of an industry
that was the biggest employer in the
area causes as many problems as it
solves.

And unlike the Taliban, the Afghan
Government is perceived to be weak,
and although President Karzai is a
Pashtun, most of the government are
from northern tribes, of which Helmand
Pashtuns are suspicious (to say the
least). Elsewhere in Helmand, the public
face of the government is either the ANA
and NATO forces or the Afghan National
Police (ANP), who are seen as

Throughout the region, life expectancy is
under forty.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that

the greatest desire of most Afghans in
Helmand is to live in peace and security.
And for many, the Taliban do offer that.
It may be an extremely harsh Sharia-
based rule of law, and heavily dependent
on intimidation and violence, but a
significant number of Helmandis still
believe that is the best they can hope
for. As one British major said, under the
Taliban, a person could leave his wallet
lying on a wall in Musa Qaleh, and find it
still there two days later. They also
provided jobs. There were around 200
heroin processing plants in the Musa
Qaleh area alone, all of which are now
shut.

There was a work party of Afghans

repairing a road in the centre of town.
Each man was being paid $10 a day – a
significant sum in Helmand – by the
British for their labour. One of the men
was asked what he had been doing for a
living before working on the ‘Cash for
Work’ scheme. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘What
about when the Taliban were here?’ He
grinned and said, ‘Then I worked in a
heroin factory.’ Cash for Work, as the
British Stabilisation Team in Musa Qaleh

British troops of the RAF Regiment talk with Afghan locals, in 2007. Photo courtesy of Susan Schulman.

Helmand has been for
many years, and
remains, the most
violent province in the
country, the heart of
Afghanistan’s narcotics
trade

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surrounded by AFVs, with machine guns
and rifles pointed at them, or be yelled
at, especially when those doing it are
foreigners.

There are also the massive logistical

difficulties involved. There are few
metalled roads, and none in Musa Qaleh,
for example, nor even a bridge across the
wadi. Few places have running water or
regular electricity. Supplying the forces in
Musa Qaleh comes in the form of a
convoy of trucks that literally drive
across the desert from Camp Bastion.
The distance is around sixty miles, but
one convoy took two days as it struggled
across wadis and soggy sand, and
weaved through farmsteads made of
mud and straw. Admittedly, it was a
particularly wet winter, but it is usually a
good day’s trip even in good weather.

Nor will the infrastructure improve

until the insurgency has been quelled,
because no construction company wants
to build roads – or for that matter, dams
and hydro-electric power stations –
when their workers are liable to be
murdered and their efforts sabotaged. As
partisans discovered in the Second World
War, it does not require much military
training or even many weapons to
seriously interrupt the efficiency of an
occupying power.

Finally, and no less important, are the

difficulties of operating amongst people
of a deeply complex and alien culture.
Large parts of Helmand are extremely
primitive. In the outlying rural areas, not
much has changed since Alexander the
Great passed through in 329 BC, and
most people live in conditions that offer
no concession whatsoever to the modern
world. People who live in, at best,
medieval conditions tend to also have a
corresponding mentality. Other parts of
the province are more civilised; a visitor
to Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, for
example, would find similarities with any
backwater town across the Muslim third
world: a lively market, some metalled
roads, vehicles and evidence of
rudimentary electricity supply.

Most Helmandis are Pashtuns, and

for the majority, Pashtun and tribal
loyalties come before even religion.
Indeed, many Taliban fighters take up
arms because of kin and tribal
connections. The Pashtunwali code is

something each Pashtun grows up with,
and it is complex and largely
incomprehensible to an outsider who
immerses themselves in the Pashtun
culture for years, let alone a soldier on a
six-month tour.

In other words, the conditions,

culture and needs of Helmand are
completely different throughout the
province. The tendency of NATO has
been to make assumptions about what it
is that Helmandis want, as viewed
through a westernised democratic lens,
and to apply these assumptions to all
and sundry, when the reality shows that
no such template can or should be
imposed. Compounding the problem has
been the six-month tour of duty, a
period that is too short for any soldier to
begin to understand the place in which
they are supposedly bringing better
governance and stability. An
improvement might be a two-year tour
for each brigade, with its components
rotating in a staggered fashion after a
six-month period, but at present the
British Army is so over-stretched it does
not have the capacity to make such a
change.

The point is, however, that Helmandis
face a choice: the Taliban, or the NATO-
backed National Government. The
Taliban are culturally and tribally close to
the majority, and they provide security,
order and jobs (most are prepared to
work in heroin plants), if not economic
development. They also bring with them
harsh Sharia Law. On the other hand, the
National Government, backed by the
riches of NATO, has the potential to
provide redevelopment and long-term
prosperity. The downside is that many
Helmandis are sceptical as to how long
NATO will stay and there are serious

institutionally corrupt and ineffective.
Helmand Afghans hope NATO will bring
about great changes and improved
governance, but there is some scepticism
about how long they will stay here.
Salim Mohammed, asked whether life
had been better under the Taliban,
replied ‘Not better,’ and then said again,
‘but there was security.’ Was he
optimistic for the future? ‘As long as the
British stay.’

While the Taliban have been seriously

weakened due to the heavy fighting over
the previous two years, the insurgency is
far from over. Indeed, despite money and
backing from across the border in
Pakistan and elsewhere, the Taliban’s
survival up until now owes more to
support from the uneducated and
isolated local populace who are deeply
suspicious of any outsiders. History
supports this. Whether it be Italian
partisans in the Second World War or
Communist rebels in Malaya in the
1950s, resistance – or an insurgency –
cannot continue without the tacit
support of a proportion of the
population.

The challenge, then, facing NATO, and
specifically the British, who have taken
the stabilisation of Helmand as their
particular task, is to win over the support
of the people, gain the consensus of the
populace and at the same time,
strengthen governance. This is a
gargantuan task, not least because of the
on-going insurgency, which means a
large part of the military effort has to be
directed towards combat rather than
development. It also means the show of
force has to be emphatic and ever-
present, which is, in turn, intimidating for
the civilian population. Helmandis may
know they will not be summarily
executed, but no-one in their right mind
– Pashtuns included – would want to be

While the Taliban have
been seriously
weakened due to the
heavy fighting over the
previous two years, the
insurgency is far from
over

There are few metalled
roads, and none in Musa
Qaleh, for example, nor
even a bridge across the
wadi

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NATO and Afghanistan

49

doubts as to the effectiveness of the
National Government, who are also
perceived to be tarnished by corruption.

This, put very simply, is why the

British effort in Helmand faces such an
uphill struggle, but the only way the
future of the province can be secured is if
governance is improved and the right
redevelopment and progress established.
The local population will only put up
with foreign troops on their doorstep if
those soldiers are delivering a better
future.

What has been needed is first, an
acceptance that Western ideology and
assumptions have not been necessarily
right for Helmand; and second, the
development of a tool that would help
NATO to apply the right kind of
reconstruction and development in
different parts of the province, and which
at the same time would overcome the
limitation of NATO troops’
understanding of the cultural
complexities in Afghanistan. The good
news is that it seems that great strides
are now being taken in both cases.

Brigadier Andrew Mackay, only

recently returned from commanding 52
Brigade, has done much to champion
these changes in approach. A former
policeman in Hong Kong, he had later
served lengthy tours in Bosnia, Kosovo
and Iraq, experiences that left him
feeling frustrated and angry in equal
measure. In each case, he says, the
multi-national coalition was trying to
impose Western ideas onto cultures it
understood very little. He spent most of
his nine months in post-war Baghdad –
trying to help re-build the Iraqi Police
Force – banging his head against a wall.
‘There were no clear lines of authority or
responsibility,’ he says, ‘no clear sense of
how things might get done – no clear

(TCAF), had been received coolly in the
States, but Mackay had been taken with it
immediately and had realised that with a
bit of refining it might well work in
Helmand. Since their meeting in 2006,
the two men had been in regular contact
and Mackay then invited Derleth to the
mission rehearsal exercise before
deployment. By then, it had been honed
into four carefully worded questions
which every soldier on the ground could
ask any Afghan they met: have there been
changes in the village/neighbourhood
population in the last year? What are the
most important problems facing the
village? Whom do you believe can solve
your problems? And what should be done
first to help the village? Their answers
would demonstrate both what locals
needed, as opposed to wanted – and
show precisely what the make-up of the
local population was at that given time.

‘And that was the Eureka moment,’

says Wardlaw. ‘I thought TCAF was going
to be just a tool that would allow us to
establish what the main problems that
caused instability were. I didn’t realise
until Jim started talking about it at the
[rehearsal exercise] that if you then kept
asking those questions, over time you
would also get measurement of effect.’

As Derleth points out, it is a simple

system, and its answers ensure that we
can provide what local Helmandis need
rather than what we think they want to
help the coalition-backed government
gain consensus. ‘Before we do anything,’
says Derleth, ‘we need to ask ourselves,
will this new school, for example,
decrease support for the enemy? Will it
increase support for the government?
And will it increase the government’s
ability to gain support? If the answer is
‘no’ to any of those, then don’t do it.’
This also applies to questions of women’s
rights. Of course, we in the West believe
in sexual equality, but that is not
necessarily the way in Helmand. Winning
consensus means winning the support of
the adult male population – and if they
do not want enfranchisement of women,
then imposing it will work against efforts
at stabilisation.

TCAF results in Lashkar Gah, the

provincial capital, and elsewhere, such as
in and around Sangin and Gereshk, have
been surprising and have demonstrated

plan. It was a case of making it up as you
go along. There were also endless
different agendas depending on who the
individual was. It was just chaotic,
frankly.’

He was also painfully aware that

much of what they had been trying to do
had had very little impact on the
insurgency. ‘It was all output-based,’ he
says. ‘It was all about the number of
projects done or how many vehicles had
we delivered to the Police and to the
Army, how many uniforms, how many
weapons, how many police stations had
been created; it was all quantitative not
qualitative.’ And so he began to wrack
his brains for a tool that could show
whether what they were doing was
having a positive effect and helping
them achieve their goals.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Wardlaw,

commander of the Brigade’s engineers,
had also had a frustrating time in Iraq
and like Mackay, had been thinking hard
about a means of implementing effective
reconstruction – one of the principal
tasks of army engineers in Iraq and
Afghanistan. He was particularly
conscious of the limitations of the six-
month tour in coming to terms with
both the language and complexities of
the local culture.

When he first met Brigadier Mackay last
summer, there was an immediate
meeting of minds. The Brigadier told him
about an American academic called Dr
Jim Derleth, a senior strategic planner
and conflict specialist working for USAID,
whom he had met the previous summer
during a trip to Washington. Derleth had
devised a new impact-measuring tool,
the strength of which was that it made
the most of the force’s greatest asset – its
troops – and their ability to get amongst
and talk with the local population.

Derleth’s tool, which he labelled the

Tactical Conflict Assessment Framework

The Taliban are
culturally and tribally
close to the majority,
and they provide
security, order and jobs

What has been needed
is first, an acceptance
that Western ideology
and assumptions have
not been necessarily
right for Helmand

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than troops with little previous
experience of such a task.

Indeed, the taking of Musa Qaleh

back in December also provided an
opportunity to implement yet new
approaches to combat the Taliban. The
town was a northern strongpoint for the
counter-insurgency, and its capture was
key to undermining the power and
influence of the Taliban in the northern
half of the province. It was agreed that
collateral damage had be kept to a
minimum (there were subsequently no
civilian casualties in the town and
damage to buildings was minimal) while
preparation for the immediate post-
battle stabilisation of the town took up
more time than the actual military
planning. Consequently, several projects
were up and running within days of the
capture of the town, and by the end of
January, a school had been refurbished
and was teaching 400 children. By
March, this figure was 900.

The fact that Task Force Helmand is
working in an open spirit of co-operation
with Mullah Salam, a former Taliban
leader recently appointed as District
Governor of Musa Qaleh by President
Karzai, demonstrates the recognition
that local problems are best solved by
local measures and that future stability
begins now, free from the shackles of the
past. There is still understandable
nervousness about Salam, and yet so far
he appears to have proved an inspired
choice. Charismatic and persuasive, he is
prepared to listen to NATO advice and is
working hard travelling around the
district talking to tribal elders and urging
them to turn away from the Taliban and
towards the Kabul Government. His is
precisely the kind of strong leadership to
which Afghans instinctively respond.

No-one in Task Force Helmand is

under any illusion that a massive task still
lies ahead. Critically, there is still the long
overdue overhaul and retraining of the
ANP, for example. Yet large parts of the
most populated regions – along the
Helmand River – are now relatively stable
and secure, and those areas are only
increasing in size. Musa Qaleh, despite
the military presence, is bustling once
more. Hawkers and traders are busy in
the town bazaar, and even travelling
through the town back in January there
was little sense of menace. Bombs are
rare; there is a real sense of hope, albeit
tempered with caution, amongst the
increasingly returning population.

Many of the new approaches

established in recent months are being
continued by 16th Air Assault Brigade
who have recently taken over from 52
Brigade, not least the use of TCAF. But it
is not yet accepted British military
doctrine. In contrast, the US military,
always quick to learn, has put aside any
earlier doubts and having seen how
effective if can be, has adopted TCAF
wholeheartedly. Lieutenant-Colonel
Richard Wardlaw has even presented
TCAF to 3 Commando Brigade who are
next to take over in Helmand.
Furthermore, the US military have put
aside any earlier doubts and are using it
in Afghanistan. But as Lieutenant-
Colonel Wardlaw points out, TCAF has to
be part of a wider change of emphasis.
‘There needs to be a greater shift from
an enemy-centric J2 focus,’ he says, ‘to
more of a human environment focus.’ In
other words, we should use our
intelligence not only to directly combat
the Taliban, but to also help us win the
consensus of the population.

Clearly, the significance of the recent

changes in doctrine and policy in
Helmand has wider ramifications, as
many of these can be applied to any
post-conflict mission. There is no
suggestion that TCAF should be used in
Iraq, for example, yet it is essential that
these new approaches are now
developed and refined further. Only by
doing so, do we have any chance of
long-term success in Helmand and other
post-conflict situations around the
world.

䊏

not only that the tool works but also
that their earlier assumptions had often
been quite wrong. Moreover, results in
the two places were very different,
showing just how wide local differences
can be.

Moreover, TCAF has also been

accepted by the Provincial
Reconstruction Team (PRT), made up
from a combination of Foreign Office
and Department for International
Development (DfID) civilian officials. In
another sea-change of thinking, the PRT
has, over the last year, not only bought
into the concept of increasing Afghan
governance rather than imposing
Western ideology, but has also grown
enormously from just four employees to
nearly thirty now. This figure is still not
nearly enough, but progress is being
made. More importantly, the civilian and
military components of Task Force
Helmand work closely together at
Lashkar Gah in almost seamless co-
operation. ‘When I was in Bosnia,’ says
Brigadier Mackay, ‘military and civilian
headquarters were three miles apart.
Now one of my officers has been
complaining that us being in buildings a
hundred metres apart is too far.’

Hampering progress was Foreign Office
and DfID concerns over the safety of
their employees, which meant PRT
officers were unable to stay overnight
anywhere other than Lashkar Gah. With
travel in Helmand so difficult and with a
shortage of helicopters, this was
seriously limiting their effectiveness.
However, there has been a relaxation of
these rules in recent months and there
are now PRT officials permanently in
Musa Qaleh, for example. This means
that civilians with greater understanding
of the culture and local conditions are
directing the stabilisation process rather

Large parts of the most
populated regions –
along the Helmand
River – are now
relatively stable and
secure

Preparation for the
immediate post-battle
stabilisation of the town
took up more time than
the actual military
planning

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