CHAPTER 11
PLAN
All the men in the Posse are true warriors, men I consider to be brothers. I love them all dearly.
MOTHER
Once the idea was clear in my mind, I called the commander of ISAF, David Richards. “Here’s the situation,” I said. “I have to be unconventional about this, so it’s going to be a long, drawn-out process. We’ve created a four-phase plan that has some dates on it, but those timings are loose. The decisions to move from one phase to another will be based on conditions, not calendars.”
We couldn’t anticipate how the Taliban would react to our plans. We had a notion of what we could do to them with each action, but the proof would come only as events unfolded. Medusa was to be an effects-based operation. I wanted my team to be agile enough to take advantage of the situation on the ground. I would not limit us to fixed timelines, and instead would work with my planners to set down a number of conditions—which, if and when realized, would trigger other actions. This approach would give us the flexibility to gain and maintain the initiative as things changed.
We foresaw four distinct phases of activity:
1. Shape
2. Strike
3. Exploit
4. Stabilize.
Originally, we had expected Phase 1 to run until mid to late September, by which time Ben Freakley and his RC East brigade commander John Nicholson would be done with the air assets and other enablers we needed. That would all change on August 19, when a pivotal meeting with Governor Khalid would change our entire understanding of the situation in Panjwayi. More on that later. For now, I’ll just say that until that moment, we thought we had weeks before launching our strike phase. Now we had days. On August 22 during Phase 1—Shape—ISAF’s priorities changed. David Richards quickly agreed to make Operation Medusa NATO’s main effort in Afghanistan. Ben Freakley immediately reassigned all his assets to RC South. We would have his aircraft, weapons and additional troops to guarantee the force ratios necessary for our single battalion to go up against the largest Taliban force ever assembled. But we would have those only for the first two or three weeks of September, after which the balance of power in RC East might swing to the Taliban factions there.
While Medusa would be the main effort for RC South from late August into September, the operation would represent a mere third of our activity. We had an undeniable duty to keep concurrent pressure on the Taliban throughout the rest of the region. As we would soon learn, as we fought Operation Medusa we would also deal with no fewer than sixty other TICs and be forced to maintain an operational tempo accelerated daily by a steady stream of competing requirements. While managing the replacement of 3 PARA by the Royal Marines, our British task force in Helmand would keep fighting in Sangin, Kajaki and Musa Qala. The Romanians would take over from the Americans over in Zabul. Special Forces would execute operations every day in every province. We would actively support local communities in Afghan development zones across Zabul and Helmand provinces. ISAF headquarters would continually ask for data on police patrols completed, hospitals supported, key leaders engaged, roofs repaired, markets opened, and on and on. As such, our story was to be one not just of courage under pressure but also, and perhaps as heroic, one of managing the complexity, contradiction, confusion and chaos thrown at us from every direction. Every organization involved had its own unique and often conflicting perspectives, needs and priorities. Paradoxically, of everything we had to deal with, the Taliban would be the only straightforward factor.
The intent of Operation Medusa was to defeat the Taliban in the vicinity of Zhari and Panjwayi in order to maintain freedom of movement along Highway 1 and uphold the security of Kandahar City. If we managed that, we could set the necessary precondition for the establishment of the Kandahar Afghan Development Zone (ADZ), which would soon bolster the local economy, return these districts to some normalcy and prove to the locals that, supported by the NATO coalition, their elected authorities in the government of Afghanistan could offer a better long-term solution to their troubles than siding with the insurgents. But if we dragged our feet and if villagers in these districts sided with the Taliban, Kandahar would surely fall.
It was as though we had been planning an operation in some backwater Ontario town and had just learned we were about to lose Toronto to the enemy.
Our priorities were threefold. First, we wanted to demonstrate to locals that NATO’s commitment to the area was real, and that its capability to make a difference was high. Second, we would try to get local leaders to assist us and the Afghan National Army with our actions in Pashmul. We learned this aim was at immediate risk if we didn’t progress quickly to Phase 2—Strike. Third, we wanted to get the message across to less committed Taliban fighters that it was time to surrender or die.
In our plan, we all had specific conditions to watch for. For example, once H-Hour, our start time, was declared and the operation was underway, and if Charles Company detected no fire south of the Arghandab riverbank, they would immediately move to establish a bridgehead in the vicinity of the white schoolhouse, oriented north. If and when our own troops on the southern flank were threatened and resourceless, I would deploy our first-echelon reserve to assist. If certain defined objectives were successfully secured, A Company would clear the route to the next ones. If and when we assessed that enemy strength had been reduced by 75 per cent, our battlegroup would send in companies from opposite sides to squeeze the remaining Taliban and link up.
Each unit knew what to do, and had a specific role to play and a long set of actions to carry out on particular objectives at anticipated moments. These were detailed in a brilliantly concise synchronization matrix, a two-page document that presented Operation Medusa at a glance.
A critical element of our Phase 1 activity was coordinating all our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets to prepare for the battle. Their job was target development. This meant the tracking of high-value and medium-value targets within the areas we had designated as objectives. And there were many. In Pashmul alone, we identified eighteen locations that required constant monitoring, including leadership and communication posts, IED factories, mortar installations, medical stations, supply caches, supply routes, ambush sites, and even likely nearby spots from which Taliban scouts could give early warning of our arrival. We would use a protocol called F2T2EA, a beefy acronym for the six discrete steps we take to find, fix, track, target and engage the enemy and assess the effect created. As we did that, our ISR assets would be feeding NATO troops on the ground the increased situational awareness they needed to move deliberately and effectively onto each objective.
Based upon an assessment of all that intelligence, we developed a template. Then we kept evolving it based upon the situation on the ground and further intelligence reports. From this we assigned the various objectives, which for this operation took the names of sports: Rugby, Tennis, Lacrosse, Cricket, Baseball and so on. We then assigned named areas of interest (NAI), on top of which we put air assets to develop, i.e. to confirm or revise what we thought was there.
The shaping portion of the battle was in part to validate the template before we attacked. In that first phase, we would also make sure everything was working and coordinated properly, and we would move into the rhythm of building and sharing daily reports of enemy placements, movements and capability.
Using our full combination of intelligence assets, including our network of friendly local nationals, we could track exactly where and when Taliban commanders were setting up their headquarters. We watched and listened. We learned that Mullah Abdul Hanan had taken a position far south of the Arghandab River—in Talukan, just above the Red Desert. As the Taliban’s senior commander for central Kandahar, Hanan was brought in as a kind of brigade commander to run the whole defensive operation. From his command post in Talukan he would dispatch thirty-man fighting cells into Pashmul and rotate them out to Servan and Zangabad as needed for rest and refit. Listening in on Hanan’s communications, we learned that he intended to fight us with a combination of IEDs, mortars and ambushes, and eventually full-on assaults.
Hanan controlled his next-in-command Haji Lala, who was installed across the Arghandab from his boss not far from Siah Choy. (Lala had been one of the tribal leaders at that pivotal meeting at Khalid’s house.) In charge of tactics, Lala was the Taliban equivalent of a battalion commander, controlling as many as five sub-commanders, who each gave orders to three twenty- or thirty-man cells. Those guys—including Kaka Abdul Khaliq, Mullah Gul Agha and Amir Sabar Mohammand—were effectively the Taliban’s company commanders. I mention their names only to show that our intel was detailed. We already knew, for instance, that Amir Sabar Mohammand was in place just under Sperwan Ghar on the south of the river, and that, while ready to reinforce Pashmul with fresh fighters as needed, he in no way welcomed the prospect of fighting on his side of the river as he didn’t have enough troops there. We tucked that fact away for later.
What was important for us was our growing understanding that the Taliban were abandoning their typically lean chain of command. With their brigade commander, battalion commander and company commanders, their span-of-control model was beginning to look a lot like ours. Here again, they were swinging from insurgent to conventional warfare.
We could watch and listen to them with our sophisticated array of intelligence and surveillance systems. In the air we had Predators, long-endurance drones that fed line-of-sight video to us in real time. We had Sperwar, French-built unmanned aerial vehicles that could send target images back from as far as 150 kilometres away. Other platforms collected data from ultra-high altitudes, while British Nimrod aircraft conducted aerial surveillance. On the ground, other assets gathered intelligence on the Taliban as well. From that intelligence we drew assumptions, and with our assumptions we made plans.
But planning is more art than science.
We often made assumptions that were wrong. We hadn’t yet realized that M’sūm Ghar itself would be overrun with Taliban. So close to Kandahar, it was like finding a wasp’s nest on our porch. We would deal with that surprise later, but I mention it now because it made us aware that intel is always possibly wrong, possibly incomplete. You can base a plan in part on intel, but you’d better be ready to change it twenty seconds after you put that plan it into action.
For one thing, every student of military history knows to expect trickery. The smartest tactic each side can use is to fill the enemy’s intelligence network with false information. Every day I reminded my officers that we now had “a clear picture of the enemy situation with a plus or minus 100 per cent chance of error.” Phase 1—Shape—would be like the opening moves of a chess game, where expert players shift pieces ambiguously to confuse the opposition about their intent. As they feint, they look to see how the other side reacts and, more to the point, what the other side is failing to consider. They tease the enemy to reveal itself. They look for weaknesses. And that was exactly what I intended to do.
The Taliban were hard to find but easy to kill. As we pounded the enemy in Phase 1, we would watch until we saw them and detected a so-called pattern of life. Every time they poked their heads up, we’d chop those heads off and watch what happened. We’d do it over and over and over until they started making stupid mistakes. That’s how we would shape the battlespace. Once their command and control was fully lit up, once they were confused, fatigued and as close as I thought they would get to combat ineffectiveness, I would start Phase 2—Strike—and we’d go in and kill as many of them as we could.
The key to operations is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Without knowing what is out there, you will never have good situational awareness. Canada bought the Sperwar, an unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by SAGEM in France. Sperwar relayed images of possible targets to us back on the ground. The mere sound of the Sperwer flying overhead made many Canadian soldiers comfortable that they had eyes on target. This was a critical enabler that we used extensively in addition to its bigger cousin, the Predator. Why the Canadian air force did not invest in this capability sooner defies logic. Nowhere today will any commander send out troops without access to a UAV. This little bird was certainly loved by every soldier on the ground, who could see what was around them. The surveillance pod on this aircraft was one of the best we could obtain.Credit 22
At that point and only at that point, we would revert to conventional protocols. We would advance objective-by-objective, deploying our troops just as we had in the Second World War and in the Korean War, but this time with much better surveillance and air power. The condition I would be waiting to confirm was not complicated: I simply wanted to be sure they were tired. After that, we’d finish them off.
That would be Phase 3, when we exploited our advantage. We’d be mopping them up, clearing the area of every last fighter. When that was done, and only when that was done, we could get to Phase 4 and begin stabilizing the region. We’d encourage displaced residents to come back to their homes, launch an ambitious program of projects with our partners in order to rebuild anything that had been destroyed or damaged, put our provincial reconstruction teams back to work building new infrastructure, and allow the Afghan army and the police to take a more dominant role in security. With the Taliban gone, we would finally be able to get on with our actual mission.
That was the plan I sent early in the second week of August to David Richards and Ben Freakley in Kabul, and to Mike Gauthier and Rick Hillier in Ottawa. I told them frankly that when we launched, the operation would probably look good for the first couple of days, even the first week, but after that it would seem dragged out. They would start being put under incredible political pressure to get the thing over and done with, but there was no way I could put a reliable timeline on our execution of this campaign. We may make the plan, but the enemy gets a vote.