CHAPTER 9

STUDY

Americans criticized the LAV III as not being good on the terrain in Afghanistan. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think a lot of that comes down to driver skill. Greg Moon could put a LAV through that doorway over there without ever leaving a scratch.

MOTHER

We never set out to plan a glorious victory with Operation Medusa. Subsequent criticisms have taken pains to imply that there was no enduring victory and that therefore Operation Medusa has been assigned more credit than it deserves. But in truth we set out with a humble objective: not to lose.

Here’s why. By winning in Panjwayi, the Taliban could set up a safe haven in a district from which they could launch operations to isolate Kandahar. And this isolation would have a deep impact. The end state they imagined was the removal of all government and ISAF control in Zhari, Panjwayi and Kandahar City. It would mean the successful achievement of their stated objective, which was to destabilize the government of Afghanistan.

A loss for us would bolster Taliban resolve immeasurably. It would make it possible for them to increase their recruiting and their fundraising. They would then be able to solidify their links back to Pakistan, with an inevitable increase in the flow of weapons, ammunition and drugs across national borders, along the myriad ratlines that served as feeder routes for the whole area—and, ultimately, in broad daylight along a Taliban-controlled Highway 1. And the Kandahar Afghan Development Zone (ADZ), one of the key concepts proposed in the General Richards–approved ISAF plan, would never happen—with all its projects to rebuild schools, dig irrigation canals and repair roadways in the many communities that needed them simply abandoned. So the day after Ian Hope’s group stumbled into an ambush at the white schoolhouse on August 3, we began to plan the large-scale, complex kinetic action that would become Operation Medusa.

The Taliban had probably also figured out that a resounding defeat of ISAF forces would be met with horror by the home populations of participating NATO nations, whose governments would then likely question their overseas commitments amid the public outcry. And they were right. We Canadians knew that after reporting a major loss of Canadian lives in Afghanistan, Harper’s minority government would come under deafening criticism from opposition parties smelling an opportunity. The Brits knew that the same was true of their own government, which had already demonstrated its lack of resolve by sending troops into Helmand in such a reduced state that they couldn’t operate effectively. They moved out in day patrols only, unable to staff and supply a single forward operating base even if they wanted to. When British troops moved by vehicle, it was often in unarmoured Land Rovers, some of which didn’t even have doors.

The fall of Kandahar would also send waves of distrust through the fledgling government in Kabul, proving to the population that it had neither the brains nor the brawn to deal with the Taliban as promised. As such, we judged the most dangerous outcome to be the establishment by the Taliban of a permanent operating base in the districts of Panjwayi and Zhari, likely using the market town of Bazar-e-Panjwayi. From such a hub they could launch a series of attacks to block the routes into Kandahar City for as long as they wanted.

We knew the insurgents’ likely course of action. They would continue to use attacks in the vicinity of Pashmul to draw the ISAF and Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) into Taliban-prepared defensive positions. Our soldiers would then have to fight on foot, and could be either ambushed from thick cover or crippled by IEDs as they advanced over terrain intimately known by the enemy.

From the outset, we began weighing up our chances of success. We had many advantages: We knew their defensive positions. We knew their staging areas. We could see them from the air and listen in on their mobile phone conversations, as unencrypted cell phones were their chief means of communication.

But while we all knew that failure was not an option for us, failure was a very real prospect. The Taliban had many distinct advantages over our own forces. First, they were seasoned soldiers with high morale on a campaign with deep spiritual significance to them. They all spoke the local language, knew the local customs and recognized all the local people on sight, many of whom they had already intimidated by violence into doing their bidding.

The Taliban are not an insignificant force. They are sometimes portrayed by the media and others as a ragtag, spontaneous group of a few people who fight. That’s really a poor generalization of a very competent political, military, economic and social entity. Yes, the tribes will themselves fight, but they will also outsource violence to others. Historically, the Mujahideen were joined by foreign fighters—Chechens, Saudi Arabians and others—who came to fight as part of the Mujahideen against the Russians. That established a tradition of paying for security. One of the tactics of the Mujahideen, and now of the Taliban, was to overrun a district station, police station or government station and then say to the population, “See? They can’t secure you. The Russians can’t secure you. Those loyal to the Russians can’t secure you. We the Mujahideen have taken over this area. We’ll secure you.” So there is psychological pressure to reconsider who can provide security whenever these district police stations are overrun.

BEN FREAKLEY

The Taliban also knew every millimetre of the local terrain, had made smart choices about where to cache weapons and ammunitions, and had stored enough food to last through a sustained action. This capability for tactical resupply gave them extraordinary staying power.

They had effective small-unit tactics (arguably more seasoned than most of our own, given the lack of combat experience of our only recently arrived troops). They worked and fought together in tight sections of four to ten men. They had an ability to concentrate forces strategically against any attacking force to maximum effect, as they had proved handsomely to the Soviets. Most of their senior commanders had first bloodied themselves in those battles against the Russians.

Their knowledge of their enemy was high: for one thing, they knew our tactics, having seen them unfold in as many as twenty-five incidents per day since we arrived in February. They had studied how we moved, when and why we dismounted, and how we regrouped and withdrew. They had extensive early-warning systems, all of them human—from cooperative villagers and urban contacts in Kandahar to spies within the ANSF, and particularly from within the police who were notoriously corrupt. They had deeply entrenched information operations between Panjwayi and Pakistan, the abetting nation in which they carried out their fundraising, recruiting and training.

Finally, they were hard to find. They did not wear uniforms and, with their local stashes of weapons and ammunition, could move unencumbered until coming to an assembly area where they could pick up everything they needed. They knew the ground. They moved among the people. In most cases, they were the people.

They were also aided greatly by the terrain. We could tell that just by looking in. On the south side of the Arghandab River stands a small mountain known as M’sūm Ghar. Ghar is the Pashto word for “mount,” as in Mount Olympus in Greece or Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. M’sūm Ghar lies just south of Bazar-e-Panjwayi, on the road from Kandahar. The view from the mountain is spectacular—clear across the Arghandab River to a rolling expanse of lush fields interrupted by dozens of ancient villages (hamlets really), farmers’ houses, storage sheds, and grape-drying huts of clay that are four feet thick in places. Fed by water from the river, this area is one of the most fertile in the region.

Poppy fields are common further from the river at the outer edges of the district, while vineyards are everywhere, filled with earth-trellised clumps of fruit that produce nine-tenths of Afghanistan’s grapes for export. Once gathered, the grapes are moved to narrow drying houses called kishmish khana. These huts are also armoured bunkers. With deep walls pierced by ventilation slits, they’re like Martello towers. The Taliban routinely use them as storehouses for weapons and munitions, control centres and, during actual firefights, bomb shelters. A 25mm shell fired from the turret of a LAV III will bounce right off the walls. Even with solid-rocket propulsion, an M72 light anti-tank round fired at the same wall will produce plenty of rubble but few actual holes.

Of the ordnance we had at our disposal, the only effective offence against kishmish khana came from our 155mm howitzers and bombs dropped from aircraft. Bombs were effective when on target, but only because the damage to the building was total. In such cases, collateral damage was a constant risk. The enemy inside could be killed with one bomb blast, but the long-term effect on the community might be severe. The Taliban knew this: they dug into these structures in force, daring us to come and get them just as they had dared the Soviets to do. A telling fact is that, despite having 115,000 Soviet troops in the country at any one time who busily slaughtered between 75,000 and 90,000 Mujahideen fighters, no Soviet flag ever flew over a single Panjwayi village. We were well aware of that as the launch date for Operation Medusa drew closer.

The terrain, therefore, clearly favoured the defender. While easy enough to see through and over, earth-trellised vineyards were perilous to cross. With every footfall we risked triggering an IED. And marijuana fields were their own kind of horror. Each dense forest of cannabis offered a different and forbidding microclimate. A platoon making its way through would have to navigate a dark, sticky obstacle course with temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius and 99 per cent humidity. These steam baths were everywhere.

M’sūm Ghar

M’sūm Ghar, at the top of this photo, is the site where in August Mike Wright had his first engagement against a sizeable Taliban force. M’sūm Ghar would become very familiar to 1 RCR as they staged out of there, attacking across the Arghandab River (to the left) into Objective Rugby. Immediately to the southwest (bottom of the picture) lay Sperwan Ghar, the site of some of the fiercest fighting during Operation Medusa. It never ceased to amaze any of us how areas like this, with little to no cover, could be areas of tremendous strategic importance to the Taliban. Sperwan was the home to a Taliban training site, which was a complete surprise to everyone. It might account for why Mike Wright had encountered a large enemy force nearby, and it was certainly the reason that Task Force 31 had to fight intensely to capture it. It took us days to rout the old Soviet outpost from the Taliban, with tremendous loss of life on their side as they countered our attacks with fighters from across the Arghandab River in Siah Choy. The terrain in this picture will be forever burned into the memories of those who fought there. This was the Taliban’s key location and they fought dearly for it. TF 31 was later honoured by Canada’s Governor General with the Commander-in-Chief Unit Commendation for incredible accomplishment in the face of the enemy.Credit 17

Afghanistan is a beautiful country

Afghanistan is a beautiful country. The mountains and deserts and the forests in the north are breathtaking. I understand why this was a country that attracted tourists in happier times. During our forays into the countryside, we came across hundreds if not thousands of poppy fields like this. Poppy is considered by Afghans much as our own farmers consider corn or wheat; it is a cash crop, and the yield off a field like this will support a family for most of the year. Our challenge was twofold: garner the support of the locals who grew crops like this and distance ourselves from those intent on destroying these crops. Inevitably, our troops would be there when a field was being destroyed and therefore we would be associated with destroying the livelihood of some local. We wrote a letter to the authorities suggesting farm subsidies for crops other than poppy. It was never looked at in any seriousness. Alas, this complication made our job of trying to build a nation and winning over the people next to impossible.Credit 18

While the terrain might have been an advantage to the Taliban, they had many notable weaknesses we intended to exploit. First, they were tied to the very terrain they knew so well. They had no air support for transport, surveillance, resupply or evacuation. They arrived in or near Panjwayi in their fleets of Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, but once in theatre they had to go almost everywhere on foot. While this made them harder to find (vehicles being easier to spot), it made them slow to redeploy. And their limited operational mobility made them easy to pursue once they had abandoned their defences. It also meant they had no medical capability beyond first-line treatment. If a seriously wounded fighter could not be treated on site, his likelihood of recovery was minimal.

Over and over we had witnessed the Taliban’s inability to sustain a firefight. We knew—and they had experienced—that after thirty minutes in any engagement they would suffer severely. After that could I guarantee to have attack helicopters, fast air (aircraft such as A-10 Warthogs that could move in quickly) and bombers on hand—whatever it would take to strengthen our response and win the engagement. Whenever troops come into contract with the enemy, an event we call troops in contact or TIC, we move in to support them. While it might take us half an hour to get to the party, we would then have the ability to unleash hell. That half-hour window became a focal point for us. I told each of my commanders that in any engagement, the first thirty minutes was his to fight. From brigade headquarters we would ensure that everyone had artillery and medevac in that period, but our guys on the ground would have to fight the furious opening act on their own. The Taliban got to know this, and typically disappeared after thirty minutes of any fight to avoid being pounded.

Elements of resupply posed another limitation to the Taliban. Depending on the location and event, they were restricted to any supplies of weapons and ammunitions they had cached in advance. Some IED components such as blasting caps were difficult for them to procure. Medical treatment and supplies were another issue. Before any planned combat, doctors who were either sympathetic to or coerced by the Taliban would come in and create pop-up clinics and dispensaries, so we made a point of looking for them. We learned that even just the sight of someone new working in a pharmacy was a good indication of a forthcoming action. We routinely intercepted and dismantled their medical supply chains to make it harder for them to treat and evacuate their wounded. This then forced them to use local hospitals. Whenever random farmers began showing up at Kandahar’s Allama Rishad or Mirwais Nika hospitals—or even the Kandahar University Faculty of Medicine—with severe, traumatic injuries, we knew that the Taliban’s front-line medical services had crumpled. Our interventions were being effective.

Their command structure was also a liability. At least until the time of Operation Medusa, the Taliban fought with a command-centric organization in which a small handful of seasoned leaders planned, monitored and directed every aspect of operations in the field. Our own command structure used a multi-level chain of authority, from the brigade commander to the battalion commander to his company commanders to their platoon commanders, and eventually to section commanders who each directed ten or so men and women. In the case of the Taliban, there were usually fewer than three links in that chain, and often just two. Taliban fighters had no local authority. They would wait to be told from on high what to do. We knew that if we could knock out the small number of senior commanders in any area, we could effectively freeze their decision-making ability.

Communication was perhaps the Taliban’s most exploitable weakness. While we worked on multiple frequencies with many layers of encryption, they used only VHF and GSM for cell phone, handheld radio and satellite phone comms, none of which were secure. We used their transmissions to vector in on where they were. We listened in all the time, and sometimes even phoned one of them up directly to tell him what we wanted him to hear.

Lastly, they had limited night vision. Night vision goggles are expensive. Whether monocular or binocular, they require image intensifier tubes milled to rigid tolerances. Tough to come by. Almost everything we owned had night-vision capability, from Predator drones to rifle sights. We could see anything the Taliban got up to, even on the darkest nights. They had no such ability, which forced them to attack only in the light. By evening civil twilight, they were quiet.


Given the strengths and weaknesses of the Taliban, our planning established six discrete categories of high-value targets we intended to hit hard early on. The first targets were their commanders, and with them the tools they used to communicate with their troops. Every senior officer is a worthy target in combat, and with the Taliban’s disproportionate span of control, the loss of any one leader would leave huge numbers of fighters rudderless. By August our intel confirmed that ten or so of these senior commanders had taken up positions in Panjwayi, so we made sure their likely locations were identified as critical objectives in our battle plan.

Our second high-level targets were the factories where IEDS were made and the bomb-building teams who assembled them were trained. In the early years, the Taliban had simply repurposed Russian anti-tank mines as IEDS. Later, they perfected the art of loading explosives into used cooking-oil containers. As long as they could source blasting caps, production was fast and cheap. They had factories throughout the district—once those factories were gone, we could be sure that any road we cleared would stay that way.

Next were their indirect fire assets. These were the mortars and anti-tank rockets used to fire against remote targets. Taliban mortar teams varied in proficiency. There weren’t many of them, but in 2006 most were concentrated in Helmand and Kandahar, so we had our hands full. Before Medusa, we had destroyed one crew in Kandahar, and I remember being painfully impressed by the accuracy of another such crew in Helmand (we never did get those lads). Their mortars were the 82mm Russian-made weapons left after the defeat of the Soviets in 1989.

Virtually all of the Taliban weapons and ammunition were and are of Soviet origin. The country, much like the Balkans in the 1990s, was one huge ammo depot. The Red Army left so much ordnance stashed across the country that the Taliban were never short of things to throw at us. Perversely, they had an easier time getting ammo than the Afghan police and Afghan National Army did. Small arms, mortars and anti-tank mines were all available to those willing to dig them up—and, in the event of an urgent requirement, arms merchants in Pakistan would happily fill the gap.

Rocket launchers were a unique threat. The Taliban used the Russian-made RPG-7, a shoulder-launched, rocket-propelled grenade launcher that remains the darling of insurgents and guerrillas worldwide. They fired rockets in salvoes at our passing helicopters, so when travelling by air we all kept a sharp eye on the ground for telltale smoke blasts. But even when fired from the shoulder by an expert marksman, the RPG is really only effective under 1,000 metres. So the Taliban had to bring these weapons in close to make a kill. We were often surprised, sometimes fatally, by the stealth of their rocket teams. While the threat from these weapons compelled us to designate them as high-level targets at the outset of Operation Medusa, it was really their operators we were after. Proficiency in indirect fire assets demanded a high level of training, and killing one insurgent who had that training always created more of an impact than killing several green recruits toting AK-47s. We knew that once the operators of these assets were neutralized, Taliban attack capability would be seriously degraded. So we planned to do exactly that.

Fourth on our list was the Taliban’s combat service support—everything other than weapons, troops and ammo they needed to accomplish their combat missions. This included supply, maintenance, transportation, medical treatment, and all other services used to keep their fighters on the battlefield. Many of these elements were moved into the region through the Red Desert, and so I knew we had to close those routes early on. We had to stop infiltration.

Of course you have close proximity to Pakistan, so you had people coming in from the west of Helmand into Kandahar Province. You had people coming from the south, and people even coming from the east. They could have infiltrated from the north, but Ian Hope’s Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry had done a lot of work there. For infiltration, the northern part of Kandahar was much more stable than the east, west or south.

BEN FREAKLEY

Fifth came their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability. Most of their intel came from human sources—locals either sympathetic to or under the control of the Taliban. There were two ways to stop that flow of information. The first was to prove through consistent development activities that we were of greater value to the locals than the Taliban. (In my view, NATO failed miserably at this, and still does.) The second was to remove those sources from an area, which we intended to do in Panjwayi by dropping leaflets announcing an imminent attack. Ironically, the Taliban were themselves about to do this, by banishing civilians from the area as they dug in for the battle of the decade. Well, most civilians. They would keep enough behind to use as human shields during our air attacks.

Lastly, we had to weaken their information operations, better known as propaganda. We were not the only ones waging a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the local villagers. Every time we had a TIC with the Taliban and withdrew afterward (which was always), the insurgents would hail the event as their victory and tell lusty stories of yet another resounding NATO defeat. They couldn’t drop leaflets from the air, but after dark they posted announcements in the doorways of local huts and houses. We collected these so-called night letters to learn what they were saying.

All in all, as we moved toward Operation Medusa we felt we knew the enemy well; however, that would be no guarantee of our success. The battlegrounds of history are littered with the bones of armies who knew their enemies well.