JTF 2 ops in Afstan, 2001-2/Today? Allied SOF

Finally some people in the CF (government/public service too?) are talking a bit; pity they won't say anything about the present--see below. Two pieces by Allan Woods of the Toronto Star:

1) Forged in the fire of Afghanistan

...
That hard drive was the ultimate quarry of the Canadian mission, part of Task Force K-Bar, the name given the unit of special forces soldiers which arrived in Afghanistan from seven countries. It included Canada’s JTF2.

[More on JTF 2 and Canadian special forces here and here; plus on Task Force K-BAR:

Enduring Freedom Task Force Earns Presidential Unit Citation

...The Task Force was comprised of U.S. Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, Land), Special Warfare Combatant-craft crewmen, U.S. Army Special Forces, U.S. Air Force Combat Controllers, and Coalition special operations forces from Canada, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Turkey...]

The inside story of that mission can now be told for the first time following a Toronto Star investigation into the top-secret operations that would cement Canada's reputation as one of the top special forces teams in the world.

The international task force has been credited with killing more than 100 top level Taliban and al Qaeda leaders and the JTF2 stalks the enemy in Afghanistan to this day. But the distance of time has now shed light on that initial six-month deployment of Canada’s most secretive soldiers...

Until now, none of the behind-the-scenes details were known of Canadian operations in southern and eastern Afghanistan in the first months of what has stretched into a nine-year war.

“It gave us credibility around the world,” recalled one of the 40 Canadian commandos involved in the mission...

It was December 5, 2001 before JTF2 touched ground at a Kandahar airstrip...

Art Eggleton, the Liberal defence minister at the time, confirmed that the government was dispatching 40 members of the elite unit to Kandahar, but even Canadian military commanders with the 750 regular force soldiers that arrived on the battlefield in January 2002 were not privy to JTF2’s operations...

...the government seemed to enjoy the political boost it got out of telling Canadians that its crack counter-terrorist team was on the frontline of the war on terror without having to disclose some of the more uncomfortable details to the House of Commons or the country.

The Afghan chaos caught up with Eggleton, though, on January 22, 2002, when the Globe and Mail newspaper published a photograph on its front page showing three special forces troops in green camouflage uniforms – incorrectly identified as American soldiers – leading detainees out of an aircraft at Kandahar Airfield.

Members of Canada’s secretive JTF2 unit escort three detainees across the tarmac at the airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Jan. 21, 2002.
DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/AP FILE PHOTO

It later emerged that the soldiers were in fact members of JTF2 and that the detainees were handed over to their American counterparts. The admission by Eggleton prompted political and legal concerns both in Canada and within Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s Liberal caucus that Canadian soldiers were helping capture detainees that were bound for the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba, a legal no-man’s land that became a focus of anti-war critics and human rights groups.

Eggleton weathered that political storm [what, no judicial enquiry? meanwhile on the UK Afghan detainee front: "Afghan spy chief: 'I told MI5 that prisoners were being tortured' UK forces are accused of handing over Taliban detainees to Kandahar interrogators despite claims of ill-treatment"]...

2) Friends and foes in an Afghan shooting gallery

It was easy to see the enemy everywhere in the wild west, early days of the Afghanistan invasion.

The country, some military officials later recalled, was a commando “shooting gallery” and the top secret missions amounted to little more than man-hunting.

But the soldiers of JTF2 are trained just as much in the art of restraining their lethal force as in dishing it out to an unsuspecting enemy. That training was put to good use one day for the members of Canada’s premier counterterrorist unit.

The details of JTF2’s participation in the initial invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 were shared with the Toronto Star by key actors involved in the mission, giving a rare behind-the-scenes look at Canada’s top secret special operations force.

They were dispatched high into the rugged mountains of Afghanistan early in 2002 on a reconnaisance mission as part of Task Force K-Bar, a team made up of coalition special operations forces from around the world...

The soldiers of JTF2 were expertly camouflaged to avoid detection, but the surveillance squad was nevertheless discovered by a small group of Afghan men who stumbled over the commandos while on a mountain excursion. Apparently they were hunting birds.

In special forces parlance, they had been compromised. But now the snap decision-making of the elite soldiers came into play. If the hunters were actually enemy fighters, then it was a “hard compromise” and they would sanitized, eliminated, killed.

A “soft compromise” would result in the innocents being captured nonetheless, though their lives would be spared.

The Canadians lay in wait and prepared for the worst, stealthily slipping silencers onto their weapons if the need arose.

It did not. Capturing the unsuspecting hunters was effortless. Carrying out the rest of their mission, for which they had a “no fail” mandate, was the challenge.

They forced the birders to their knees at gunpoint and bound their hands behind their backs, striking mortal fear into the captives who apparently expected the same type of summary execution for which Afghanistan’s Soviet invaders two decades earlier had become notorious...

As the helicopter arrived at the landing zone that day, the JTF2 commandos quickly and quietly clipped the cuffs off their Afghan helpers, allowing them to slip away as they boarded the aircraft and lifted off into the sky.

As for other special forces in Afstan:

US Special Forces and the coming Kandahar offensive

UK SAS to Afstan [plus info on Aussie SOF]/Blackout on our special forces

NZ to deploy SAS to Afghanistan

Update:

Elite U.S. Units Step Up Effort in Afghan City Before Attack

Small bands of elite American Special Operations forces have been operating with increased intensity for several weeks in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan’s largest city, picking up or picking off insurgent leaders to weaken the Taliban in advance of major operations, senior administration and military officials say...

Instead of the quick punch that opened the Marja offensive, the operation in Kandahar, a sprawling urban area, is designed to be a slowly rising tide of military action. That is why the opening salvos of the offensive are being carried out in the shadows by Special Operations forces.

“Large numbers of insurgent leadership based in and around Kandahar have been captured or killed,” said one senior American military officer directly involved in planning the Kandahar offensive. But, he acknowledged, “it’s still a contested battle space.”

Senior American and allied commanders say the goal is to have very little visible American presence inside Kandahar city itself, with that effort carried by Afghan Army and police units [emphasis added]...

...while allied officials say they will be relying heavily on Afghan forces to take the lead in securing the city, that same tactic has so far produced mixed success in Marja, where Marine Corps officers said they ended up doing much of the hard fighting...

To shape the arrangement of allied forces ahead of the fight, conventional troops have begun operations outside of Kandahar, in a series of provincial districts that ring the city. American and allied officers predict heavy pockets of fighting in those belts. Kandahar, according to a senior military officer, is “infested” with insurgents, but not overrun as was Marja [see this post and end of this post]...

Upperdate: US SOF also working on local "militias"--with pushback from State Dept.:

U.S. training Afghan villagers to fight the Taliban

Meanwhile ISAF/CF seem to be developing another track:

NATO looks for a few good militiamen in Kandahar; hoping to convert to cops