A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan
By James Fergusson
Published by Bantam, 2008

The coalition soldiers in Afghanistan appear to be tethered goats in history’s grinding maw. My review for The Nation, published on March 22.

There’s nothing in “A Million Bullets” that astute newspaper readers are missing, but no newspaper is going to lay out the whole sorry banquet like James Fergusson has, and that’s why his book needs to be ingested in its entirety.

Getting the information piecemeal, often still spinning, is no way to assess a war, and certainly not some ethereal “war on terror”.

There’s no spin in this carefully composed account of the British effort in the US-led campaign up to early last year. The arguments and counter-arguments are all given a fair shake, even if Fergusson concludes by recommending immediate negotiation with the Taleban — something America is likely to allow only over many more dead bodies.

America and its allies — down to just Britain, Canada and the Netherlands — went there to get al-Qaeda, right? So why are their soldiers and airmen dying fighting the Taleban? These are two entirely different entities, a fact few people realise but one that Fergusson makes clear.

Despite the picture painted of them in the West, the Taleban have demonstrated their malleability in matters of faith, morals and warfare. If al-Qaeda once trained its fighters in Afghanistan, they’re long gone, into Pakistan. And al-Qaeda trained its flyers on American soil, it must be remembered.

In the meantime, Fergusson seems to accept the prescription of many British officers: more boots, fewer battleships. Assuming the damage already done to relations isn’t irreversible, forget the poppy crops for now and get more men in there to fix the place up again.

Get back to the original hearts-and-minds ambition that was bled away when Afghans had a sudden, violent reaction to seeing the awesome machinery of war thunder across the sky once more. They went through this with the Russians: rocket-propelled grenades against heavy tank armour.

They went through this three times with the British: muskets against machine guns. What’s going on in southern Helmand province is, to many, history’s fourth Anglo-Afghan war.

Fergusson trekked through all the helicopter bases, army barracks and officers’ clubs and collected the eyewitness accounts. The book is full of natter about weapons and vehicles, endless politicking, flubbed opportunities, clashes with US strategy, bottomless corruption among the Afghans on their side. There is the expected dust storm of jargon and acronyms wearing camouflage.

And there is ample, gritty, moving drama as well. Beginning with the battle for Now Zad (”new born” in Persian), where hell was loosed in July 2006, the fighting is described in scorching, harrowing detail.

At Now Zad the small British contingent — mostly Gurkhas — fought off two dozen attempts to overrun the base by unleashing 30,000 rifle rounds, 17,000 machine-gun rounds and 2,000 .50-calibre rounds — you can see the book’s title swiftly adding up.

The troops offer some plaintive stuff about what it’s like to kill a fellow human being for the first time and to see a mate shredded by a mortar blast. Some fight mightily with the memories and nightmares; others commit their homemade battlefield videos to DVDs with heavy-metal soundtracks.

This war is doing no one any good, and with even the top brass wondering if it’s ultimately winnable, even a generation from now, the best characterisation for the lads being dropped in there is this phrase found in the book: “tethered goats”. As in “Jurassic Park”, who among us wants to watch the sacrifice?

Associated Press offers a February 18, 2009, “update” on the book:

The top US commander in Afghanistan offered a grim view on Wednesday of military efforts in southern Afghanistan, warning that 17,000 new troops will take on emboldened Taleban insurgents who have “stalemated” US and allied forces.

Army General David McKiernan also predicted that the bolstered numbers of US soldiers in Afghanistan — about 55,000 in all — will remain near those levels for up to five years.

Still, McKiernan said, that is only about two-thirds of the number of troops he has requested to secure the war-torn nation.

“I’m not here to tell you that there’s not an increased level of violence, because there is,” he said.

The Taleban insurgents, some of whom have worked in concert with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, have increasingly focused on what McKiernan described as small-scale attacks on government targets, police and official convoys. Last week militants launched a bold strike on government buildings in downtown Kabul.

McKiernan said the number of insurgents has not grown, but they are “very resilient” and “they have continuously adapted their tactics”.

“We’re not going to run out of people that either international forces or Afghan forces have to kill or capture,” McKiernan said.