What was the situation at Kandahar before 2006?

Though Scott Taylor has a nasty tone (especially in the rest of the piece), some of his points register:

...U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was quoted in the Los Angeles Times making disparaging remarks about NATO forces letting down the Americans.

What Gates implied was that the NATO troops — particularly those in southern Afghanistan, where the Canadian contingent is based — were not experienced in counter-insurgency.

Gates compared the situation of the intensifying insurgency in NATO’s southern sector with the relative stability in eastern Afghanistan, which is under U.S. control. The implication being that the Americans know what they’re doing — NATO does not.

Using this logic, one would have to commend the German contingent in Konduz and the Italian military in Herat with having a tremendous grasp of counter-insurgency warfare because those sectors have been almost completely pacified since the Taliban was toppled in 2001.

Of course, Gates is fully aware of the vast regional ethnic diversity of Afghanistan, and his comparison of apples to oranges in this instance was aimed at placating a domestic U.S. audience. War-weary Americans have every right to wonder why 3,200 additional Marines are now being deployed to Afghanistan to fight a war they were told was won in November 2001.

At first, the Pentagon told us it was Pakistan’s fault that the insurgency in Kandahar was being rekindled; now Gates is telling Americans that it’s actually NATO’s fault for not being aggressive enough.

Canadian officers, familiar with the way in which the fiasco in Kandahar evolved, have called Gate’s comments the "height of hypocrisy." Even American Special Forces soldiers who participated in the battles that cleared the Taliban from Kandahar in early 2002 admit that the U.S. strategy was flawed from the outset.

When I visited Kabul last January, I was introduced to a U.S. Navy SEAL who had been assigned as an adviser to the Afghan Northern Alliance. When he learned that I was a Canadian, he had insisted on paying for my drinks. "We sold you guys a bucket of crap down in Kandahar, and for that I apologize," he said.

The SEAL explained that after the Taliban were chased out of the region, the U.S. left just one battalion stationed at the Kandahar airfield and fewer than 500 soldiers in all of Helmand province. The Pentagon had been completely focused on the invasion of Iraq and, as a result, from 2002 to 2005, the once scattered Taliban were able to regroup and rearm.

Supplies and recruits came in from the Pakistani side of Pashtunistan, but the small U.S. garrison in Kandahar was only concerned with self-protection at the airfield itself. Thus, when Canada accepted the change of location from Kabul to Kandahar, the Americans knew that the Canadians were walking into a veritable hornet’s nest of insurgents [now that sounds like ripe exaggeration--looks like I'm wrong, see Update].

Gates’ comments in the L.A. Times inverted this sequence of events and made it sound like everything had been going swimmingly until NATO took over and made a bollocks of things [well in fact there wasn't much fighting at Kandahar in 2005]...

Update: A retired Canadian Army major-general also takes on Mr Gates and lends support to the Kandahar "hornet's nest" point (though there was little actual combat):

...Kandahar, the ancestral home of the Taliban, was the first city to be captured when the Taliban took power, and the last to fall when they were removed from power in 2001. The city and the surrounding provinces remained quiet, for a time, only because the U.S. focus on the Iraq invasion of 2003 left the south of Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban, war lords and drug dealers.

Consequently, the first Canadian battle groups in Kandahar, based on the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry and the Royal Canadian Regiment, had to fight a Korean-style conventional campaign to break the huge Taliban force that, under previous (U.S.) management, had brazenly built Soviet-style fighting positions, almost encircling the city of Kandahar...