In 2021, the US occupation of Afghanistan ended as the Taliban took over. Much has since changed; long gone and forgotten are the days Afghanistan made headlines. No news, at least for Afghanistan’s most wartorn provinces, is largely good news.
One such province, situated in southern Afghanistan’s pivotal Loy (or ‘greater’) Qandahar region, is Helmand. Named after the major river, Helmand is Afghanistan’s largest province, stretching from its steep central highlands all the way south to the Durand Line.
The province is a major agricultural zone and was, during the occupation, a global hub for opium cultivation and the heart of the Taliban’s insurgency.
In one of the occupation’s many ironies, British troops first assumed overall command here. It was not Britain’s first time in the province, having operated here during its nineteenth-century imperial heyday which saw it launch consecutively failed invasions of Afghanistan. Britain was not the first foreign power to try subduing Helmand. As it struggled to quell the Taliban and was replaced by the USA, neither would it be the last.
The ferocity of the war against Anglo-America is attested to in Sangin district. At one point labelled ‘Sangingrad’ by British troops about the Second World War’s monumental battle, the district’s centre remains largely in ruins.
Britain and the USA were seen alike as unfriendly Western imperial powers, but Taliban commanders did notice differences.
“The British were far more careful in combat,” Haji Mullah, Sangin’s deputy intelligence chief tells The New Arab.
His superior, Jahid Mawlawi Sahib, was more blunt. “The Americans would shell anything that moved.”
Trigger-happiness notwithstanding, Washington fared little better; Helmand remained, effectively if not officially, Taliban country and the rest of Afghanistan followed suit by August 2021.
Helmand had once witnessed the armies of Alexander of Macedon. Between British invasions, nineteenth and twenty-first century alike, it had also defied the Red Army in the 1980s.
Characterising the province based solely on military history, however, would be an injustice. Its capital Lashkar Gah translates into ‘barracks’ in Dari, but Helmand had also served as a political and scholastic centre.
On Lashkar Gah’s outskirts (historically named Bost) lies the tomb of Ibn Hibban al-Bosti, the famed scholar of hadith, as well as the dilapidated but still-imposing Ghurid era Qala-e-Bost.
Conventional stereotypes depict Afghanistan as a barren and mountainous wasteland, but Helmand is low-lying and well-watered, and royal-era governments in the 1950s were keen that it fulfil its agricultural potential. The area became a province in the 1960s and benefitted from the establishment of the Helmand Valley Authority with US support, then keen to expand its Cold War influence.
[Ahmed-Waleed Kakar]
Afghanistan’s unaligned rulers jealously guarded their neutrality. They had, however, few qualms in encouraging superpower competition if they could gain materially.
Helmand was one side of a broader coin toss; whilst Washington focussed on infrastructure development in Afghanistan’s south, Moscow focussed north. The groundbreaking Soviet-built Salang Tunnel, for instance, for the first time connected the north to the rest of Afghanistan year-round in the 1960s.
The winter snow had previously blocked all routes. A foreign policy of balancing between and extracting benefits from rival superpowers revealed its hazardousness in 1978 as a communist coup plunged Afghanistan into a four-decade war that ended in 2021. Fate dictated that Moscow would invade Afghanistan in 1979’s bitter winter through the same tunnel.
The US’ legacy, meanwhile, lived on; Helmand’s agriculture evolved and opium cultivation started in the 80s. Twists of fate are seldom rare in Afghanistan; Washington once supported Afghan mujahideen in their anti-Soviet fight.
It was now the invader and occupier, confronted not just by many ex-mujahideen now fighting under the Taliban umbrella, but also haunted by the agricultural success it ushered here, as Washington tried, and failed, to ban opium. The only government able to prevail over the crop has been the Taliban. Twice.
Helmand, the entirety of which was on paper subject to British forces, instead became the deadly centre of the Taliban’s comeback and insurgency.
This partially stemmed from Britain’s preexisting notoriety, and officers could feel “the intense hatred of a people who hate[d] everything [Britain stood] for.”
Under increasing pressure, Britain upped the ante. “In this extraordinary piece of desert,” Tony Blair told troops in the sprawling Camp Bastion in 2006 “is where the future of the world’s security [will] be played out.”
Camp Bastion was Britain’s largest overseas base since the Second World War, but even its grandeur could not spare it from increasingly sophisticated attacks from a steadily bolder Taliban, and Washington would again bail out a haplessly out-of-depth London.
Thousands of US Marines flooded into Helmand in President Obama’s much-touted surge, who explained that “the likelihood of a terrorist attack in London is at least as high [or] higher than […] the United States.”
Obama had greater resources than Blair, but the differences ended there. Obama could similarly not prevail over Helmand, and both were proven embarrassingly wrong in their attempts at brandishing the occupation as a guarantor of global security. The Taliban’s flag now flutters over Camp Bastion, but it is not from here that Washington DC or London are endangered. Helmand is many things, but a threat to global security, three years after the final foreign troops left, it is palpably not.
After decades of headlines synonymising Helmand with violence, its current calm can seem eerie.
The jingoistic coverage of my teenage years, personified in Prince Harry’s much-fawned deployment, is a distant memory paling in comparison to the current quiet.
Helmand is scenic and serene, yet scarred. It is here that Afghanistan’s history is its pervasive present; shaped by those who barged into, brutalised, and were finally defeated by it.
Lashkar Gah’s mapping reveals a distinctly American design. The American-built Girishk Dam, despite frequent targeting by the Taliban during the occupation, remains standing.
The road to Sangin, meanwhile, fell victim to its strategic importance: battered by hundreds of Taliban IEDs, In worse shape is the pitifully cobbled British road from Lashkar Gah to Qala-e-Bost; emblematic of a wider British fiasco here across two centuries.
“Everything they [the British] did,” Amruddin, a local farmer said, “was like this,” pointing toward the road that had broken down my car, which locals had discontinued the use of in favour of more reliable dirt paths, and is “unfit even for donkeys.”
The legacy of war is glaring in Lashkar Gah. The occupation’s dying days featured local commander Sami Sadat lashing out as the Taliban closed in.
Bombs rained on the bazaar and killed scores, including those displaced and seeking refuge in the city. Even government offices, Amruddin recalls, were bombarded.
Now in American exile, Sadat continues lobbying energetically for foreign support, undeterred by widespread condemnation of his allegedly deliberate targeting of civilians. “Sadat’s days,” Amruddin says with a pained smile, “are not [even] worthy of remembering.”
Beyond physical wounds, the scars on Helmand’s psyche will endure.
Since Britain’s immortalised imperial past snowballs into a Taliban rallying cry, the US occupation will now be engraved into memory.
A sombre case of this lived on in Lashkar Gah’s Madrassa al-Furqan. The Taliban’s Afghanistan is one characterised by religious madrassas as a growing avenue for even secular education.
Al-Furqan taught English: usually a privilege few would snub. Here, however, where exposure to the Anglosphere was overwhelmingly violent, English instead arouses suspicion.
Qari Bashir al-Hanafi, the madrassa’s founder and student at Egypt’s Al-Azhar, explains why: “They left behind such a bitter taste in [our] people’s mouths that even their language, despite the advantages of learning it, is shunned.”
The politicisation of education, already subject to widely-covered Taliban restrictions, was on vivid display.
Whilst Amruddin is unreserved in his happiness at the US’ departure, a positive outlook for the future is less assured.
“Our new generation will remain uneducated and unskilled,” he says, pointing at local children.
His eyes welled with tears. His voice cracked under the audible knot in his throat. “My heart hurts.”
Ahmed-Waleed Kakar is an analyst specialising in Afghanistan. He holds a Master’s degree in World History from King’s College London and a Bachelor’s degree in Politics and History. He is also the founder of Afghan Eye, an independent media platform
