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The war on terrorism, starting in earnest with the military action in Afghanistan October 2001, involved British troops acting alongside the United States against al-Qaeda and the Taliban on the basis of the right of self-defence, the same right that was invoked in the Falklands War. Was the British reliance on the right of self-defence controversial either domestically or internationally? Was the fact that the action seemed to have approval from the Security Council, as well as NATO, important? While the initial operation — Operation Enduring Freedom — was based upon article 51 of the UN Charter preserving the right of self-defence, once the Taliban had been removed and al-Qaeda routed, Britain led a Security Council authorized security presence in and around Kabul providing stability while a nascent Afghan government tried to assert authority over the country. Concern was expressed in parliament at ‘mission creep’ as the functions of the NATO force (ISAF) changed, and British troops faced a resurgent Taliban in Helmand province from 2006 onwards.

This chapter discusses the impact of the Helmand Valley Development Project, the largest American investment project in Afghanistan prior to the Afghan-Soviet War, and the impact on the development of the illicit opium trade. During the 1950s and 1960s, American development projects (through USAID) aimed to transform the Helmand Valley into a rich agricultural zone by building dams, and improving irrigation and farming techniques, to prepare farmers to grow crops for regional and global markets. By the 1970s, shifts in the global supply of illicit opium led drug traffickers to Afghanistan in search of new supply, and farmers in Helmand and surrounding areas began to shift to opium cultivation. In the course of the analysis, the chapter explores the relationship between globalization and development projects, and why the Helmand Valley project played a critical role in the growth of illicit opium production in Afghanistan.

The author describes Camp Bastion and its fifty-bed field hospital. Prior to its handover in late 2014, Camp Bastion covered eight square miles of desert in southwestern Afghanistan and served as the coalition's logistical hub in Helmand. Some 600 aircraft flew in and out of the camp every day. The hospital featured an ordinary and intensive care ward, a six-bed resuscitation bay (or emergency department), a four-theater (or bed) operating room, GP and dentist practices, and a pharmacy. Each day in the hospital began and ended with a meeting of department chiefs and included many of the surgeons. It was here that patients were discussed on an individual basis and life-or-death decisions made. The author discusses the hospital facilities, services, and amenities as well as day-to-day activities.

This chapter examines the British counterinsurgency operations in Helmand, Afghanistan, between the years 2006 and 2012. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), with the British government as one of its contributing nations, granted the control of Afghan provinces, including Helmand, to its member-nations. It was an effort to prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a terrorist sanctuary. In April 2006, the UK deployed its armed forces into Helmand and implemented traditional counterinsurgency methods, thereby initiating stability and reconstruction that could be expanded over time. The armed forces, however, were unprepared, undermanned, and ill-equipped to deal with the attacks of Taliban fighters and drug lords. Various misguided and ill-conceived attempts to overcome the poor start of deployment ensued between 2007 and 2010. In stark contrast, only the efforts expended at the tactical level in 2012 were considered the correct approach.

Chapter 10 charts the livelihood trajectories of different population groups in central Helmand in response to the state's efforts to eliminate both opium production and the concurrent counterinsurgency effort. It examines the diverse and complex socio-economic, political and ecological terrains in which the statebuilding project has taken place. It draws on political economy and rural livelihoods frameworks to show how efforts to reduce opium poppy cultivation, as well as the wider statebuilding project, have reshaped the economic and political landscape of central Helmand. Particular attention is given to the underlying socio-economic and political processes that led to the encroachment of the desert land north of the Boghra Canal, and to the critical role played by the prohibition of opium poppy in the Food Zone. The chapter points to the impact of the statebuilding venture in central Helmand and how the costs and benefits have been distributed so unevenly across the rural population. Finally, it contrasts the experiences and livelihood trajectories of different population groups: those who have benefited from the international intervention, those who have suffered as a consequence of it, and those who have been driven out by the social-economic processes that it created.

Chapter 9 examines the many disparate institutions that were behind the effort to ban opium production in the “Helmand Food Zone” between 2008 and 2013. It examines how drug control became such a pressing priority for so many institutions and how reductions in cultivation became intimately tied to the wider statebuilding effort and individual performances of international and national actors. It documents how the ban on opium was imposed across the canal command area of Helmand and the way that a combination of agricultural inputs, crop destruction and increased state presence in the form of social provision and a significant uptick in national and international military forces, established the conditions for a reduction in opium poppy cultivation.

The 2009 US military surge in Helmand Province, Afghanistan — a southern province wracked by Taliban violence—involved not only the withdrawal of British forces and the insertion of 33,000 US troops, but also the addition of scores of civilian enablers whose purpose was to act as force multipliers. The HTT to which the author was assigned was one such force multiplier. Together, the U.S. military and its many civilian enablers had to contend with two interlocking challenges: understanding the complex dynamics of Helmand Province and knowing how to best work with allied components — particularly the British — in order to achieve operational success. Tackling the latter challenge proved particularly difficult. Although the British forces transferred battlespace responsibility to the United States Marine Corps, many of its civilian components remained in order to drive the capacity building agenda. Their British civilian counterparts looked like them, thus naïveté led them to believe that collaboration would be effortless. But instead, they experienced something between stonewalling and reluctant cooperation, leading them to theorize about how to best achieve success within the ISAF framework. This chapter describes the introspective analysis that helped their individual and team maturation, performance, and production.

Transition forced the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) to refocus on gains that could be sustained, to prevent the instability that would come from disappointed expectations or Helmandis’ experience of deterioration. It identified areas of success—notably in sub-national governance—as well as areas where pressure to deliver had swiftly built up Government infrastructure beyond what could be maintained. Recognizing that only authorities seen as legitimate would survive transition, the PRT shifted its ways of working to fit within Afghan Government channels. Drawing lessons from its own experience as well as the literature, it identified ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ of stabilization practice, encapsulated in a Guidance for Transition note.

Dunsby argues that contractors have become more significant in Western military operations, but their role is not well understood. Having defined contractors and their role, Dunsby examines their contribution to the stabilization of southern Afghanistan, but notes that private contractors have been strangely absent from planning in transition. He acknowledges some of the problems with local contractors, difficult relationships with governments, and the business imperative for all companies, but argues that they have been useful in training local security forces, protection, and logistics. They may develop their coordination systems for reconstruction but re-tasking during withdrawal presents contractors with very similar problems as state organizations.

This chapter discusses the British experience in Helmand Province of the October 2011 shift in the ISAF campaign in Afghanistan from direct counter-insurgency to ‘security force assistance’. The authors were members of the task force headquarters and use this personal experience alongside the campaign documentation to make theoretical interventions about military reflexivity and catharsis. The authors discuss the receipt of irregular forms of knowledge into military institutions with ambiguous and interconnected chains of command. The chapter proposes that recent military doctrinal interventions in Afghanistan are a cathartic act of self-recognition of past failures rather than purely a prescription for the conduct of operations.

Based on interview data from Helmand Province, Afghanistan, this chapter explores the relationship between tribalism and jihadism from 1978-2015. The authors argue that local actors, predominantly tribal, have taken on the mantles of different jihadi organizations in order to gain funding as a way of increasing their leverage in local conflicts with other actors. This relationship holds true in Helmand through the ‘jihad’ against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the civil war, the Taliban era, and the post-2001 US-led nation-building period. The author concludes that jihadi organizations, or other external organizations, need to understand and work with tribal dynamics in order to achieve their aims in tribal territories.