CHAPTER 5
TRANSFER
We were led by some of the toughest, meanest men and women in the CAF. I’m so lucky and proud to have served.
MOTHER
Briefing visitors from afar was part of our daily routine in Afghanistan. Everyone wanted to know what was going on, and the best way to find out was to come and talk to the men and women on the front lines. Senior Canadian military officers, such as our chief of defence staff Rick Hillier and our CEFCOM commander Mike Gauthier, clearly had a pressing need to come and take the pulse, but some visitors took us by surprise. In March 2006 when Rick was wrapping up one of his short stopovers in Kandahar, he pulled me aside to announce that he was extending his stay by twenty-four hours so that he could be with us to welcome Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, who would then remain with us for three full days.
It was not uncommon for leading elected officials of NATO nations to drop in and speak to their troops in theatre, but only for an hour or two. A stop of three days by a prime minister was unheard of. It was also a security risk. We coordinated the visit with 10th Mountain Division and OEF through their headquarters at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. Mightily impressed by this clear demonstration of Canada’s commitment to the mission, our American commanders perked right up and gave us full support. Whatever questions they had about our intentions were now going to be answered by the prime minister directly.
Prime Minister Harper came to visit the contingent in March 2006 for three days and two nights. This floored the coalition partners, as they were used to senior leaders coming in for a few hours—or maybe a day max. Our U.S. coalition partners in particular were astounded that he stayed as long as he did. The visit did an awful lot of good, dispelling some of the doubts about Canada’s commitment to the mission in Afghanistan. Mr. Harper certainly impressed us with his intellect, and he was truly interested in seeing for himself what the situation was. We learned very quickly that PowerPoint presentations were less effective than just walking and talking with the boss, and showing him firsthand what was what. The troops loved seeing the PM and everyone wanted to get in a photo with him. At first the PM’s staff set out to manage every aspect of the visit, and we had to tell them that security was ours to deal with and so any attempt to keep vehicles with guns out of the shots was ridiculous. After negotiation, we agreed to work together. The visit had a tremendous effect on the morale of the troops—and I think it had a significant impact on Mr. Harper as well. He got unvarnished opinions, which I gather he appreciated. Here the PM is touring the National Support Element (NSE) lines. The unit’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Conrad, can be seen over the right shoulder of Mr. Harper with John’s regimental sergeant major, Chief Warrant Officer Eastman, on the PM’s left side. John provided the Canadian contingent with all its administrative and logistical support. The NSE were the unsung heroes in Afghanistan. This was perhaps the best supported mission I have ever been on, in large part thanks to the logistics by John and his team.Credit 13
Stephen Harper arrived the next day with an entourage of Ottawa-based bureaucrats intent on managing every aspect of the tour as if it were going down in Ottawa or Toronto. We had to advise them that there were overriding operational restrictions dictating what they could and could not do. After some butting of heads, we all took our appropriate roles and fell into a good routine that served each of our purposes.
Our troops were pumped to see their prime minister up close. The sight of hundreds of soldiers crowding the PM, peppering him with questions and squeezing in for selfies was something to behold. I was heartened to see that the PM was equally enthusiastic and really enjoyed engaging with Canada’s front-line men and women. The Posse, not wanting to let such an opportunity slip by, asked if we too could get a photo with the boss. That shot remains for each of us one of the great mementos of the tour.
Over the next three days, Prime Minister Harper proved his keen interest in every aspect of the mission, while we learned that using PowerPoint is the worst way to brief a knowledgeable visitor. We quickly moved away from slides, preferring instead to hunch over tables and work with actual maps as we discussed the complex and unfolding situation in the southern part of Afghanistan for which we were responsible. We followed those briefings with extensive tours around camp and many dozens of ad hoc interactions with our troops. This unexpected and welcome visit boosted our morale and proved both to Canadians and to our partners in theatre that Canada was engaged and committed. That was helpful, because many people doubted that we and our NATO coalition were up to the task.
When NATO took over responsibility for the south of Afghanistan on July 31, 2006, most Afghans and Americans in military-diplomatic circles were hugely skeptical that NATO was even remotely ready for the challenge. Some of that doubt was warranted, in that NATO had little experience in actual combat, but much of the concern stemmed from bruised American pride. The U.S. had come into Afghanistan with a furious resolve to get the thing done. They had dedicated troops and equipment on a scale that no other nation could. But they had not accomplished their objectives, and the war in Iraq was beginning to consume more and more of their attention and resources. In a pivotal conversation at the time of the Istanbul Summit in June 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush had openly asked British Prime Minister Tony Blair for help in Afghanistan. Ever since, NATO had been preparing to take over.
During our five months with Operation Enduring Freedom under Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry and the 10th Mountain Division, NATO had begun planning in earnest for the transition of operational responsibility to the new International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). ISAF was itself commanded by NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC), which reported up the chain of command to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). Sorry about all the acronyms.
As commander of Regional Command South under OEF, I had been given responsibility for American troops. This clearly demonstrated that the United States trusted its relationship with Canada, and it also explained the grilling we received from all American commanders. They were making sure we were ready to command their troops in battle.
In May 2006, the commander of ARRC—a British Army lieutenant general named David Julian Richards—became the commander of ISAF as well. As such, when operational responsibility for the south of Afghanistan moved from OEF to ISAF on July 31, I would no longer be reporting as Commander RC South to Ben Freakley and Karl Eikenberry. David Richards would be my boss.
I knew David by reputation. Most did. As a brigadier in 2000 he had commanded Operation Palliser during Sierra Leone’s civil war. His original mission there had been to go in with members of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment (1 PARA) of the United Kingdom’s Special Forces Support Group and rescue British foreign nationals from the capital city, Freetown. Yet when the situation on the ground escalated rapidly, David took the initiative and, with a pathfinder unit, led the defence of Freetown in a series of bloody firefights against the Revolutionary United Front. The ensuing political backlash painted the brigadier as having acted beyond his authority, but we soldiers knew that David had done the right thing. Five years earlier the failure of another general to act similarly in Srebrenica had resulted in the massacre of 8,000 innocent civilians.
David Richards was the commander of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps when he was assigned to become the commander of ISAF. A British officer of some note, having made his name in East Timor and Sierra Leone, he was gregarious, charismatic, knowledgeable and inclusive. We were still working under Operation Enduring Freedom when he arrived, and he began our transition work immediately. We met several times early on and truly hit it off. David had his hands full leading NATO in its largest role outside of its normal geographical confines. He made Ben Freakley his deputy, which was an outstandingly wise choice. It ensured a close relationship with the Americans and gave him access to someone who understood the complexities of the situation, since he was the outgoing commander who had overseen both RC South and RC East. David’s support of us at the tactical and operational level was unequivocal, especially during the planning of Medusa. Little to no support was coming from NATO. Regardless, David provided me with all the political top cover I needed in order to focus on the fight. I thoroughly liked working with him. He would ask the hard questions but he was always easy to work with. We remain good friends to this day. He took much pressure off us and addressed the NATO restrictions as much as he could.Credit 14
When I first met David Richards, I liked him immediately. He was charismatic and genuine. He was also an engaged commander who proved over and over that no task was too hard, no problem too thorny. As we would soon experience, David would make time for me and my team no matter how much he had on his plate. Given the complexity of operations ongoing at the transition, a lesser relationship would have been catastrophic to what we were doing on the ground at the time. And given the confusion within the NATO coalition, I’m not sure a lesser soldier could have made it work. The turnover wouldn’t be easy.
As July 31 approached, there was considerable skepticism in Afghanistan amongst the Americans. I was aware of it probably more than others because I met a lot of senior Afghans and senior Americans, and I could tell that while they weren’t openly opposed, their egos had been dented by the fact that a Brit was about to be commanding Americans at theatre level, which I was told was only the first time since the Second World War. They knew that NATO member nations would be more constrained by political and ethical considerations than they ever had been. European nations hadn’t shown much muscle or spunk in decades, and the Americans were doubtful that these fighting units had been sufficiently hardened—which, without doubt, the Americans were. They sort of thought the British and Canadians would be all right, but they fully knew we had woefully too-few troops for what we were being asked to do, which was far more than they had ever undertaken.
DAVID RICHARDS
David, Karl and Ben shared one opinion, however. To be successful, they needed soldiers who were able to do the job. They had admired the skill of Lieutenant Colonel Ian Hope, our PPCLI battalion commander who had led Task Force Orion, but that group was now leaving to make way for Omer Lavoie and his Task Force 3-06. All three generals were now concerned that the Canadians taking on RC South were too new, too inexperienced, too soft.
Battle-hardened troops are different. There’s a look about them. They are wary. They move differently, they talk less. They keep their weapons clean and ready. They wear their kit. There’s an obvious lack of complacency about them. In battle-hardened troops there is an edge and also a caution. They don’t just get up and do things; they look around first. They learn tricks. They go around walls rather than straight through doors. They know when to ask others to solve problems for them, so instead of just charging over the top, they’ll ask for artillery or for bombs to be dropped from an airplane. It’s an understanding that a soldier is taught in training yet doesn’t really appreciate until he’s been through an inoculation period. That’s true at every rank.
DAVID RICHARDS
David also worried that there weren’t enough of us.
I knew the Canadian army was small and, despite Rick Hillier’s enthusiasm and the professionalism and determination out there, the fact is, they really had only a battalion-plus. A battalion on average is about 800 soldiers. The same as the British had in Helmand at that time. But the British had a bigger army to draw on. It was inevitable that we would have to draw on them at some stage because it was just too big for one battalion.
DAVID RICHARDS
In fact, the Americans also had too few troops, especially in the south, which was why things were going wrong in Kandahar and Helmand. With Iraq unravelling, they simply couldn’t put enough troops on task, which is why Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were leaning on NATO to take over. Yet despite their need for NATO, the Americans’ doubts about NATO’s readiness were widely whispered. The Taliban in particular perked up at the news. They started to occupy what in military terms are called prime military positions in the Panjwayi Valley region. These included defensible locales with marijuana and poppy fields, high hedges, orchards, vineyards, irrigation ditches, a network of dried riverbeds called wadis, and a cluster of villages to the north of the Arghandab River, which formed a natural boundary virtually impossible for an attacker to cross without being repelled. Highway 1, the critical stretch of highway that was once a southern leg of the Silk Road, passed right through their territory. At any time they could foray out onto the road and destroy whatever was using it at the time.
The Taliban was in force in Panjwayi. Rather than attack from their positions, they simply defended their strongholds and warned the locals that big things were coming. Their growing presence cast a pall over the whole of Kandahar Province. In military terms, they were psychologically and physically dominating the terrain.
People in Kabul began to say, “We can’t let this keep going on, the Taliban is cocking up procedure by NATO in its first month.” I started to get very interested in it. I met with David Fraser who had come to the same conclusion at the same time. We agreed that the Canadians would have to occupy this ground for two reasons: first, to defeat the Taliban at the beginning of our period in command; and second, more importantly in many respects, to show NATO countries, Afghans and Americans alike, that NATO could fight and win battles just as well as the Americans—indeed better. That was our aim. The problem was that, during August, the Taliban developed a very strong defensive position and we had too few troops by military doctrinal standards—and other respects—to do the job easily, so we had to come up with a plan that reflected that.
DAVID RICHARDS
Afghanistan has been a trading nation forever. Until airplanes, trade was conducted by land or sea, and no land route has been more valuable than a series of roads, paths and passes known as the Silk Road. Already established in the second century BCE, these corridors became the chief routes for Chinese exports of high-value spices and textiles (thus the name), and they were policed and protected across vast stretches, with the Great Wall of China as the easternmost security segment. One of the main routes through India to the Mediterranean markets was the long stretch of the Silk Road that passed through Quetta in present-day Pakistan, up through Kandahar and Herat in Afghanistan, then west through the Persian Empire and on to Baghdad in Iraq. The 575-kilometre segment from Kandahar to Herat is now a paved motorway that goes by the somewhat less-romantic name of Highway 1. No matter its name, it’s still the main trade route for goods out of and into Kandahar. Anyone who controls Highway 1 controls the Afghan economy. One of the aims of Operation Medusa was to prevent the Taliban from doing precisely that.Credit 15
And so Medusa was born.