John Lane - Chicken Street: Afghanistan before the Taliban: Clearing the Deadly Remnants of War

John Lane spent 35 years serving worldwide with the Royal Navy in frigates, a guided missile destroyer, and in the Commando Carrier HMS Albion. He saw operational service in the Malayan Emergency with the 1st Loyals (North Lancashire Regiment), in Aden, and in North Borneo during Confrontation. He commanded naval establishments in Oman whilst on secondment to the Sultans Armed Forces, and in Gibraltar, and also served on the NATO Staff in Malta and at the British High Commission in Canada. In 1972 he was evicted by Colonel Gaddafi from Tripoli following the departure of the British Naval Mission from Libya, and from 1975 to 1977 he served onboard the Royal Yacht Britannia. He was awarded the OBE in 1985.

After leaving the Navy John Lane was Senior Manager for the Armed Forces Hospitals Southern Region in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and in 1991/92 he was head of mission for the HALO Trust in Afghanistan. He has also worked for the Ryder Cheshire Foundation in Western Tanzania with Burundi refugees, and with Christian Solidarity International in Eritrea and Nagorno Karabagh. Humanitarian appointments with the International Red Cross, the European Commission, British Executive Service Overseas and VSO have included post-earthquake Armenia, Croatia during the Balkans War, post-genocide Goma, Hargeisa in Somaliland, Belize, Northern Bangladesh, Peru, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and what was then North West Frontier Province, Pakistan following the SE Asia Earthquake. John Lane now tends an allotment on the banks of the River Wandle in London and has a chacra smallholding near Iquitos on the banks of the River Amazon.

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Designed and typeset by Farr out Publications, Wokingham, Berkshire
Cover designed by Euan Carter, Leicester (www.euancarter.com)
Printed by Henry Ling Ltd, Dorchester, Dorset

Text John Lane 2012
Photographs & maps John Lane unless otherwise noted

ISBN 978-1-909384-26-2
EPUB ISBN: 9781909384767

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For those who have gone on ahead

May their souls rest peacefully on the wings of the Afghan winds

List of maps and photographs

In colour section

FOREWORD

A fter a distinguished career in the Royal Navy, John Lane could have eased back and become a hospital administrator or school bursar, like so many of his kind. Instead he decided to save the world, or at least to have a go at it. The part of the world he decided to save was unsalvageable Afghanistan, in the turbulent period between the departure of the Russians and the rise of the Taliban.

He was head of mission (no capital letters, he insists) for a British-based de-mining charity under the direction of a controller known as the Colonel. Neither the charity nor its controller is named, though their identities can easily be guessed. The Colonels military exploits as a legendary battalion commander on active service had not endeared him to the High Command of the time but he made an inspired choice with his head of mission in Kabul, a mariner whose previous mine experience was mainly with sea-mines, except for a tour of duty in Croatia. There were no sea-mines in Afghanistan, but it was a devils garden of other sorts leading up to the later IEDs (improvised explosive devices).

Commander Lane RN learned quickly and he writes about it brilliantly. He has an ear for dialogue and irony and an eye for detail and history. He casts light on our present grim predicament by explaining what came before it.

Many of the best war memoirs arrive rather late on parade. This is one of them. It takes time to reflect and to draw conclusions from the chaos and anarchy of life on the front line. J.G. Ballard said of his own war time experiences, as an internee of the Japanese, that it took him twenty years to forget and another twenty to remember.

In John Lanes case it looks like ten to forget and ten to remember. His own front line in Afghanistan, then as now, was wherever the armed groups decided to fight either in the capital, or where advantage might be gained from an ambush, a rocket attack or the laying of a minefield.

He has a rare ability to describe a fire-fight and the shock of the incoming. He is also acutely aware of the costs and casualties. And of the necessity, in a memorial stone (in a Christian cemetery in a Moslem country), of making the inscription as short as possible, so that it gives less offence and makes a smaller target. Such are the details that make his book a masterpiece of its kind.

If only our politicians had shared his understanding of the history of Britains three Afghan wars, set out in the back-light of these pages, they might not have opted for our fourth. An Epilogue like rolling thunder gives a factual account of later events including the vacuous expressions of optimism from successive British Defence Secretaries, set against the rising death toll from our costliest and longest conflict of modern times. We have to ask, in opting for this fourth war, did they ever pause to wonder who won the other three?

The quotation on the title page says it all:

Now all is done that could be done
And all is done in vain.

Martin Bell
Journalist, ex-MP

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