Howard Leedham - Ask Forgivenss Not Permission: The true story of a discreet military style operation in the ‘badlands’ of Pakistan

Pakistan-Afghanistan border

A phrase may be grossly over-used but still remain true and Fact is stranger than fiction is one such. The hitherto unknown story that Howard Leedham has to tell could have come from the Northwest Frontier of Rudyard Kiplings time.

Before the story even starts he had had a career to satisfy most tastes for danger and adventure. Starting as a volunteer Navy entrant he became a Clearance Diver. (Thats the dangerous stuff by the way.) Taking a commission he went on to become a Commando and helicopter pilot with qualification for fixed wing thrown in. Most of his career was spent inside the closed world of special forces and their equally special ops.

By his mid-thirties he was out; married to an American girl, father of two small girls, emigrated to the USA and was working in the world of executive jets. And bored stiff. That was when the State Department Air Wing came over the horizon with an insane offer.

Personally I did not know that the State Department even had an Air Wing. Britains equivalent, the Foreign Office, certainly does not. Washingtons offer was to go to Pakistan and its border with Afghanistan and create with American Bell Huey helicopters, two private contractor pilots, half a dozen mechanics, Pakistani aircrew and twenty-five of the fiercest mountain tribesmen an anti-Taliban, anti-Al Qaeda night raiding force. Likely tasks: snatching high value terrorists and hostage recovery. Nothing to it.

The budget would be peanuts, the attitude of the US Embassy pretty unrelieved hostility, the cooperation of the Pakistani bureaucracy almost suicide inducing and of their Army unrelieved obstructionism. As I said, nothing to it.

The following year, described in these pages, cost him his marriage and (several times) almost his life. The first months were spent multi-tasking. Wheedling out of the US Government enough helicopters to do the job; keeping the ultra-politically correct bureaucrats of the Embassy in Islamabad as sweet as possible by telling them almost nothing, cajoling an initially sceptical Pakistani general into trusting him, winning over the British, the American contracted pilots and ground crew, purchasing weapons from dubious freelances round the back of the bazaar and gaining the loyalty of some of the most formidable killers those bleak mountains along the Durand Line have ever produced.

Kipling mentioned the Pathans with awe. They are pretty immune to fear or pain and regard taking prisoners as only for wimps. But starting with twenty-five he was later given fifty to train. And they had never been in a helicopter let alone in pitch darkness staring at the world through night-vision goggles.

Operating by day was impossible. Those trying it ran straight into Taliban ambushes. Traitors and spies were everywhere. Quetta, capital of Baluchistan, was and remains for a white unbeliever a grenade with the pin out. So that became his HQ.

Somehow it happened. Somehow, on a shoestring, the helicopter -borne, night fighting intervention force began to frighten the black turbans out of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and opium barons who had with impunity denied those terrifying mountains to any forces of law and order, Pakistani included, since time immemorial.

But it was a one-year contract and when it ended it ended. The Pakistani military wanted to take over what Howard Leedham had created. Since then reports have it that the wild country between Baluchistan and Afghanistan is as lawless as ever despite the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars.

And the Pathans? Those fifty dark featured, tough, lean, hard warriors, as dangerous as the land that made them; what happened to them? Who knows? But for a few months led by an infidel Britisher, they terrified those whose only language was terror. Kipling would have loved them.

Frederick Forsyth