Ben Anderson: Behind Afghanistan’s Front Line

  • Betty Wood talks to war journalist, author and filmmaker Ben Anderson about his experience in Afghanistan
    Ben Anderson, filming in Marjah
    Above: Award-winning director, writer and producer Ben Anderson filming in Marjah, Afghanistan

    ”I nearly died four or five times”, Ben Anderson says, without a hint of drama or hyperbole you might expect to accompany such a statement. But that’s Ben for you; over six foot tall, he cuts an impressive, though not entirely discreet figure. He’s broad, tanned and not built at all dissimilarly from the Marines he’s spent years following around the most dangerous regions of Afghanistan, filming America’s longest running war.No Worse Enemy, the book he wrote about his experience as a war journalist filming Battle for Marjah comes out in paperback this month. Ben’s agreed to meet me in a much safer region of the world — central London — to talk about his book and documentary, which has just been nominated for three Emmy Awards in the States. “I’ve had a run of coming second for the big awards in the UK and this is my first run at the American awards, so I’m hoping for a bit of luck this time!”

  • Every bit as gritty as Battle for Marjah, No Worse Enemy begins with what could easily have been the end of Ben’s story: “I don’t know if you remember [in Battle for Majah when] the sniper took a shot at me?” he asks, taking a sip of coffee. It’s hard to forget. “I was 100% convinced I was going to die. The adrenaline ran out of my body; I went limp; I accepted it. ” I thought, ‘you’re stupid to be with these guys… You deserve to die’. I swore that if I survived, I’d never go out with those guys again”. Luckily, the bullet missed Ben. But not everyone was so fortunate: the sniper killed a marine nearby, and after scrambling into a ditch, the marines either side of Ben were hit, one of them badly.Ben-Anderson, Marjah.The marine was flown home, and Ben stayed on with them for another two months.  So much for ‘never again’. He smiles solemnly: “Everyday was like that it some way or other”.

    A natural filmmaker, Ben Anderson is something of a reluctant author. More comfortable behind the lens, it was his frustration with the situation in Afghanistan that moved him to pick up his pen after the camera stopped rolling. “The Afghan government is spectacularly corrupt; the police are vengeful, violent criminals. A British policeman who is training Afghan policemen said to me — on the record — that 90% of the crime in theHelmand province is committed by the police. And we’re leaving these guys in charge! That’s why I felt I had to write this book; so many things just aren’t getting discussed anywhere else.”

    Using George Orwell as his guide, No Worse Enemy is a frantic mix of action, violence and personal insight few other journalists could replicate. “I could never be as good as Orwell, but I thought I’d try and be as honest as Orwell. When I wrote I thought I was going to die, I thought ‘this is what cowardice is. Some people are brave and fight and try and do something, go down blazing. I didn’t; I just wanted to curl up into a ball”.

  • A helicopter comes in for an emergency medical evacuation, while Marines and Afghan National Army soldiers with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment provide overwatch, Feb. 13, on the outskirts of the city of Marjah, Afghanistan. Marines with Bravo and Alpha Co., 1/6 inserted into the city at night by helicopters as part of a large-scale offensive aimed at routing the Taliban from their last-known stronghold.  Photograph by Lance Cpl. James Clark  Regimental Combat Team 7
    Above: A helicopter comes in to provide emergency medical aid. Photograph, Lance Cpl. James Clark. Courtesy U.S Marine Corps


    This moment of introspection is a rarity in the book; as with his films, his prose acts as the camera lens, focusing and recording details of the people around him. “I don’t like it when books about war focus too much on the reporter — I think we’ve got it easy. We haven’t got to kill anybody; we haven’t got to save anyone’s life or make decisions.”

    But there’s ‘easy’, and there’s easy: Ben goes everywhere that the Marines go, sleeps on ice-cold mud next to them, eats the same food and runs the same risks. “ TV reporters tend to turn up for a day or two, get their piece on camera (nowhere near the actual front line) and then they leave. It disgusts the soldiers and Marines.” He grimaces. “I made that work to my advantage — they respected the fact that I would hang around, go out on every patrol and they let me see everything.

    “In a way, I’m grateful that the other reporters are so pathetic, because in the long run it helped me”

    ...“They’re shooting people when I’m three foot away from them; they’re screaming about it and celebrating with me filming them; meeting families where they’ve just killed four family members — three kids and a woman, by mistake — and they invite me along to film it. I never imagined I’d get that level of access. In a way, I’m grateful that the other reporters are so pathetic, because in the long run it helped me.”

  • Ben-Anderson
    Ben’s film ‘Battle For Marjah’
    won the award for Best Current Affairs Production at the History Makers Awards’ in
    New York last year

  • .It wasn’t just the soldiers and marines who opened up to Ben: “I was amazed by how many of wanted to talk, how honest they were — people always say that they’ll tell you what they think you want to hear. I didn’t find that to be the case at all. In Marjah, we heard all about how they were ‘living under the iron fist of the Taliban’ for years, and how we’re going to ‘liberate’ the people.” When asked what life was really like for them under Taliban rule, the answer was largely to the contrary: “It was fine, there was no robbery, no corruption”.It is this corruption that Ben points to as the major problem in Afghanistan today.Out-on-patrol-in-Marjah
    .”The new Afghan police turned up: they robbed people, taxed them at checkpoints, elsewhere they abducted and raped children”. With the completion of US and British withdrawal scheduled for 2014, the civil and political infrastructure they’ll leave behind looks shaky. “You’re handing over to an Afghan force which is from the north: they’re historically the southern Afghan people’s enemy, the Taliban’s enemy, and these people are behaving disgracefully. These people are often seen as being worse than the Taliban.”In comparison to other conflict zones Ben has filmed such as Gaza, Liberia, Congo and Gaza, where conflicts were unorganized, fought by rebel soldiers in total chaos, in comparison “Afghanistan is highly organized. You go to the main base and it’s like Milton Keynes! There are roads, a Burger King and KFC, ice hockey rinks… But the fighting, that’s complete chaos.”

    “Because only doing 6 month tours, they’re all starting from scratch. It’s exactly the same for the people I was with in 2007 as it is for the people who’ve just started in Afghanistan.”

  • They’re just starting to learn which tribe controls which area, which is allied to the Taliban and to the government. There’s no one there the whole time to educate the new guys coming in about what to do, who to trust.”

    This continual state of newness is a painful reminder of another quagmire war the Americans were involved with more than 50 years ago in Vietnam.But Ben points to the lessons we could have learnt from the Russians in Afghanistan: “When they left, the government they put in power lasted for three years. I think if you put that offer to Obama, to David Cameron and everyone else now, they’d take it. That’s a dream scenario.”

    “If you put that offer to Obama, to David Cameron and everyone else now, they’d take it”

    .
    At present, there are areas of the South where the government is unlikely to hold on to power for more than a few days. “They’ll be gone in 24 hours after we leave, and then it could be all out civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.”

    For Ben, the lesson of his book lies in his prognosis for Afghanistan’s future: “We handed over control of the police, army and intelligence service to the Northern Alliancebecause they had the fighters to provide some semblance of security and we were in a rush to get to Iraq.

    “But it was never going to be a national army, or a national police force. It was always going to be one side of a civil war. We could have created a truly national army that had everyone in it, including the Taliban — but after four or five years of the old warlords, the old corrupt government officials treating them the same way they were treated before many Afghans have decided to fight again.”

    In Anderson’s eyes, the dice have been rolled, the outcome, inevitable.

  • ”I’m convinced we persuaded thousands of people to fight for the first time because they just want to get foreign troops and the Afghan government out of their back garden”.The situation is far from black and white however: “I sympathise with Obama. When he was campaigning, Afghanistan still looked like the ‘good war’, and winnable. By the time he was inaugurated, it’d taken a turn for the worse — I don’t think there was a solution then. No expert has come up with a plausible plan that would have worked. By then it was just damage limitation. Now it’s about trying to do some sort of deal with the Taliban, where they agree to stop fighting in exchange for seats in government and land — a humiliating failure if you look at our bold predictions back in 2001″.Ben Anderson filming, out on manoeuvres in Marjah

  • Ben-Anderson-plans-to-return-to-Marjah
    Ben has plans to return to Afghanistan within the next two years to continue filming

    .Despite his frustrations, the experience hasn’t deterred Anderson from returning to Afghanistan in the future — he has plans to return within the next couple of years to film entirely from the Afghan people’s point of view the next chapter of their country’s future.

    No Worse Enemy is out in paperback in October. Buy it in hardback version now, and watch Battle for Marjah online at YouTube