Canadians kill Taliban mortar team/What we achieved at Kandahar

Where are the Canadian journalists reporting on our troops in action? Americans are with theirs, and one from Stars and Stripes is with ours (link has slideshow; via Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs):

Taliban mortar team cut down by Canadians

RELATED STORY: Canadian forces take ‘ink spot’ approach

ZALAKHAN, Afghanistan — Dusk was closing fast on a patrol of Canadian soldiers as they cleared a sector of this bombed-out, abandoned village. Suddenly, the puttering of a motorbike was heard in the distance.

The sound came as a surprise. The motorcycle was the first non-military vehicle they had heard since they moved in three days earlier to set up a new outpost here, about six miles southwest of the provincial capital of Kandahar.

The patrol — a group of French-Canadian soldiers from the Royal 22nd Regiment, known as the “Van Doos” — was split between two high-walled mud brick compounds on either side of a narrow dirt road that ran through the village.

“Take cover, boys,” the patrol leader shouted, as he and two other soldiers ducked behind a high metal gate into the compound on the right.

With the near-constant shelling of artillery in the area over the previous days, it was a safe bet that the rider was not just passing through. Chinese-made Honda motorcycles are the Taliban’s favorite method of transporting fighters and supplies around the Afghan battlefield.

With the sound of the motorcycle now just outside, the patrol leader and two soldiers sprang from their hiding place and blocked the road.

Two men were on a red Honda less than 50 meters away. A third followed on a second motorcycle just behind them. The soldiers yelled for the men to stop. The men jumped from the motorcycles and began to run.

The Canadian soldiers opened fire. Two of the men dashed through a gate in a mud wall to the left and into a field before they were cut down by other troops. The third man died in a hail of fire before he even made it off the road. He fell face down in the dirt and did not move again. The fusillade had lasted less than 30 seconds.

Meanwhile, automatic weapons fire had erupted from a clump of trees about 100 meters to the south. A second burst came from across the field to the east. An explosion thundered, as a soldier fired a grenade. The enemy fire stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Three soldiers ran through the blasted interior of the first compound and came out through another gate, closer to where one of the dead men lay. Two soldiers stepped out warily, one of them pointing his rifle at the tree line to the south.

The patrol leader called for an airstrike. The first of a half-dozen 155 mm artillery rounds came in less than a minute later, exploding in shrieking airbursts to the south and the east, where the soldiers believed they were taking fire. The shells were followed by an equal number of white phosphorous smoke rounds, which also exploded in midair.

As darkness fell, a team of combat engineers moved forward to check the motorcycles and the bodies of the three men for booby traps. There were none. The other soldiers cheered and bumped fists when the engineers announced had found a 60 mm mortar tube, a base plate and four high-explosive rounds. The three men had definitely been Taliban.

One of the fighters was still alive. He cried in pain as a medic treated his wounds. The patrol leader called for a medevac helicopter.

“It’s been a good day, huh?” a sergeant said. His name, like the others, is withheld because of task force ban on identifying troops who kill or injure insurgents or civilians.

“Yeah, they were probably going to fire those mortars on us,” said another soldier. “We assured ourselves of a good sleep tonight.”

The wailing of the wounded fighter continued. He repeated the same thing over and over in a ragged rhythm. A soldier asked an Afghan interpreter what the words meant.

“I don’t know,” the interpreter said. “He is saying nothing.”

Finally, he grew quieter and then the crying ceased altogether. He, too, was dead. The patrol leader canceled the medevac.

Meanwhile, Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star gets high-level confirmation that since the CF took over at Kanadahar in early 2006 they have, in reality, been able to achieve little more than hold the Taliban at bay (one hates to say it but Whack-A-Mole springs to mind):

This time, they think they've got it, they've really got it: A plan, a strategy, a clear objective, a hope in hell.

And they're no longer alone, essentially on their own to pacify the great swath of insurgency that is Kandahar province, spiritual home of the Taliban.

The Americans have come, 4,000 Stryker Brigade troops, nearly double the Canadian component that has been stretched so pitifully, if valiantly, thin these past five years.

With that incoming surge, halving the battle space, the Canadian contingent can set tangible goals and dramatically shift the thrust of operations to a combination of offence and defence: Attack and protect.

That it took the lives of 127 Canadian soldiers to get here – a tipping point perchance leaning in their favour – is for others to debate and retroactively analyze.

For soldiers and their commanders on the ground, there is at least now, with this rotation, some clarity and well-defined goals, more narrowly but also more sensibly drawn on the mission map: To secure Kandahar city and the radiating communities of that heavily populated area; to move into a satellite of outskirt villages, basically living among the citizenry; and to plant themselves in the heart of the Taliban insurgency rather than chase inconsequential fighter cells hither and yon across complicated terrain that favours the opposition.

"The Americans are taking over what is a large but sparsely populated area of the province in the west and northern regions," Brig.-Gen. Jon Vance, commander of [Joint] Task Force Afghanistan, explained to the Star in an interview from Kandahar Airfield last night.

"That means we are able to concentrate our forces in the approaches to Kandahar city, where 85 per cent of the population lives."

Canadian control of that crucial perimeter should – if all goes according to plan, and they're still in the transitional phase – convince the skeptical populace that foreign forces are committed to their security, not just to killing Taliban, while allowing for quick-pace development and reconstruction, so lacking in the province even though the money is there.

"There were insufficient forces in the past to conduct a proper counter-insurgency [emphasis added]," Vance said. "We didn't have the capacity to do the primary offensive operations as well as the security tasks, all those things that encourage proper governance and development."

Canada sacrificed treasured lives establishing far-flung outposts (distance is relative when 70 kilometres from the airfield is the Wild West) to expand what was in fact a lightly indented footprint, with much of that hard-fought ground returning to Taliban "control" [emphasis added] – meaning they can operate largely unencumbered – as soon as Canadians left, Afghan national forces not yet ready to "hold" what our troops "cleared."

Over and over, the discouraging pattern repeated itself [emphasis added]. Now, Americans are assuming those responsibilities, as well as the forward operating bases in Arghandab and Zhari districts, while Canadians focus mostly on the civilian core of greater Kandahar city – the brunt of the inner urban security actually turned over to mentored Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.

Vance rejects outright the suggestion that Canada's costly efforts, especially since 2006, have been in vain. "Absolutely not. We hit (the Taliban) as best we could. We degraded their capacity to export violence. We disrupted their ratlines for bringing fighters and supplies in and out. We prevented them from moving around at will. In that sense, we were extremely successful."

Logistically, however, there was only so much the Canadians could shoulder, companies constantly shifted around on the battleground chessboard, the combat battalion – about 800 of the 2,800-strong complement, those who hump it outside the wire – multi-tasking like crazy because the International Security Assistance Force (NATO) could secure little support from other contributing nations.

"We were able to address only part of the problem," Vance sighed. "With some of those small combat outposts, the net effect didn't establish security. We were fixed and the insurgents were able to move around us [emphasis added, more here]."...

There are obstacles to building confidence among the citizenry in Kandahar. The record of unkept promises is not good. They've been down this road paved with good intentions before, and ended up roadkill.

"It starts off with some concern," Vance admits. "They say: `Are you going to stay this time?' We have to show them that we're in for the long haul – whether it's us, Canadian troops, or the Afghan forces that will take over from us, when they're ready.?

Are you going to stay this time?

What says Canada?

Er, no (so far). See end of this post on the prime minister. Even if the CF remain in some capacities, I doubt many Afghans will feel "we're in for the long haul". That will be basically the Americans and the Brits.

By the way, compare what Brig.-Gen Vance is now saying with what the head of Canadian Expeditionary Force Command was saying in February 2008:

...
The assertion that Canadian forces have created a bright spot amid the darkening security picture in southern Afghanistan represents the military's first detailed response to several academic reports in recent months that have described NATO as losing the war.

Gen. Gauthier, commander of all Canadian forces overseas, invited reporters for an unusually open discussion [good on him - MC] in Kandahar during the weekend, taking questions for nearly an hour in an attempt to show that his troops are making progress.

"In relation to where we're focused, I think we are winning," he said.

Geographic focus was a key part of the general's assessment. While saying that security has improved in the districts of Panjwai, Zhari, Spin Boldak and Kandahar city, he repeatedly declined to comment about the provincial situation as a whole [emphasis added]...

It seems we're getting more realism and less spin--though the earlier spin was no doubt necessary for troop morale--and politically.

Update thought: Clearly the "1,000-strong battle group" that the Manley panel demanded in January 2008 as allied support for the CF (effectively provided by the US Army battalion with Task Force Kandahar) was a very serious underestimation of what was needed at Kandahar.