CHAPTER 20
TALLY
I always worried about the safety of my people. It’s why I’m such a mess to this day.
MOTHER
Was it worth it? That question has been posed by everyone who has ever served in Afghanistan. For those of us who were there in September 2006, the question is specifically: Was Operation Medusa worth the cost in effort and sacrifice of human life? There is no simple answer, yet many people have come to strong opinions. My own view was from the commander’s seat, where over time I formed my understanding of why we went in, what it cost us and what we achieved.
Let’s begin with some bleak statistics. During the years from 2001 to 2017, more than 50,000 Taliban were killed, most of those being Afghan men and boys forced into service by either poverty or threat of violence against their families. In that same time, more than 38,000 members of the Afghanistan National Army, Afghanistan National Police and other arms of the country’s security forces were killed, proving that the greatest sacrifice in this campaign was made by the Afghans themselves. Among the U.S. and coalition forces, some 3,500 men and women died, including 159 Canadian soldiers and 3 Canadian civilians. At least 2,000 other civilian contractors also perished, even as they worked to repair the damage to local infrastructure caused by the war. Perhaps most tragic, more than 30,000 civilian men, women and children were killed during the struggle. During Operation Medusa, from August 19 to September 17, 2006, six Canadian and twelve British personnel died and more than fifty were wounded. And while the true number of Taliban deaths in that time will never be known, a reasonable estimate would put their toll between 1,000 and 1,500.
There are positive statistics as well. Omar Samad, Afghan ambassador to Canada, reported in 2006 that thanks to the stabilizing effects of coalition efforts, five million children had gone back to school. Three million displaced Afghans had returned to the country. The nation adopted a democratic constitution for the first time in its history and, for the ensuing presidential elections, the voter turnout was a record 80 per cent. By the end of 2006 there were sixty-eight women parliamentarians in office. More than 130 publications, television and radio stations had formed a free press. More than 10,000 weapons had been gathered and either destroyed or stored. And with the eventual input of Canada’s CIDA, and DFAIT and DND—the three Ds of development, diplomacy and defence—a vast number of programs had helped rebuild the economy of the nation, including savings and micro-loan services to 140,000 clients, of whom almost 90 per cent were women. Had we built a nation? No. But we had helped a nation take many steps to rebuilding itself. Had we lost the fight during Operation Medusa, none of those steps would have been taken. As Colonel Brian MacDonald wrote in TAO Magazine in 2006:
The Leopard tank was the last thing we thought we would need in a counter-insurgency. This was supposed to be about hearts and minds, engaging the people, and fighting the Taliban when necessary. Tanks were designed to deal with other tanks or armoured vehicles. There were none in Afghanistan that worked, and those that did sat in hangars. When we were faced with increased restrictions regarding collateral damage, the weapons we had at our disposal—including GPS-guided bombs—created too much of an undesired effect. Our analysis led us to the need for tanks, which had more precision and optics to limit their lethal effects. The speed with which the tanks were introduced attests to the will in Ottawa to support the troops, and their understanding of just how important this fight was. I don’t think Canada could have generated this effect as quickly if we had asked for them earlier in the mission. It attests to just how much the whole-of-government team had progressed. In theatre, the other coalition partners were surprised at just how fast our team back home in Canada was responding to our needs to make sure we could succeed in our mission.Credit 40
With our OEF and NATO partners, Canadians have helped Afghans and the Afghanistan government to develop a new constitution, conduct successful presidential and legislative elections, get more than one million girls enrolled in school, begin reforms in defence, justice and finance, and begin the reintegration of nearly three million Afghan refugees. And the role of the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan is to protect that work, by the use of deadly force if necessary, against those who would seek to kill the civilians, the Afghan[s], the Canadians and our other partners, who would destroy all that we have achieved, and who would turn back the clock to the oppression of earlier regimes. That is why the Canadian Armed Forces are there.
An important upshot of our time in Afghanistan was the depth and volume of what we learned. We had gone over to assist, so our Canadian mission was straightforward, at least on paper. Task Force Afghanistan would conduct whole-of-government, discrete yet synchronized operations across the full spectrum of conflict in order to support Afghanistan’s effort to create a secure, democratic and self-sustaining nation state.
We had named our task force Aegis after the shield that protected the Greek gods Zeus and Athena. Bearing the image of a Gorgon head with her hair of live snakes, the Aegis was a source of great power, knowledge and well-being to those who carried it into battle. We figured we could use those. We would go in as a combined task force composed of elements from the army, air force, navy and special forces.
In the subsequent melding of our Canadian mission with ISAF’s in RC South, we evolved a more nuanced mission statement that all contributing nations eventually signed onto:
CTF AEGIS undertakes full spectrum operations in order to enable GOA [Government of Afghanistan] efforts to defeat the adversary forces and create a secure, democratic and self-sustaining Afghan nation state.
We went as a team of teams, with military, diplomatic and development experts. As part of the thirty-seven nations contributing troops, we joined a larger mission to conduct military operations in our assigned area, making it possible for the Government of Afghanistan to establish and maintain a safe, secure environment with full engagement of the Afghan national security forces. While no one questioned the merit of our objective, how it would be executed would be confused and frustrated by thirty-seven national interpretations, thirty-seven approaches to military training and operations, thirty-seven systems of national resourcing and thirty-seven ever-changing lists of national restraints and constraints both stated and unstated. Competing opinions about what we should be doing and how it should be done would complicate the lives of each man and woman who joined the tour, as would the actions of the Taliban.
Coalition operations are never pretty. To succeed they require reasonable give and take negotiated through tremendous amounts of dialogue. The uneven distribution of resources among coalition partners and the willingness (or lack thereof) to share capabilities needed by others made figuring out how to deliver any one desired effect even more complex. Under OEF we had seen the United States provide a reasonable balance of support across each province and contingent, but under ISAF each province was the responsibility of one nation alone tasked with coordinating all activities related to security, diplomacy and development. With such a broad mandate, nations tended to be less willing to share assets such as aircraft, vehicles and even their own troops. That made conducting regional operations painful. During Operation Medusa many nations simply would not show up to fight at all. Planning was agony. Even when the operation was only days away, we weren’t certain who would support us at H-Hour. Many of the caveats exercised had never been put down in writing; instead they were decisions of the moment, presumably made in national capitals by people with no idea of the stakes. When members of the North Atlantic Council visited us (inconveniently) during the fight, I relayed the severe impediment that these national constraints had put in the way of our mission.
NATO’s mission in Afghanistan had been touted as a coalition of the willing; however, in practice we all found it to be a coalition of arbitrary limitation. This foot-dragging was never the fault of the men and women in theatre; they were trained, motivated and willing to fight. It was the aversion their governments had to all political risk that forced most of their soldiers to watch Operation Medusa from the sidelines. This left the Canadians to shoulder the burden of the fight, with the Americans, Dutch, British and Danes moving in to make this impossible coalition work.
Operation Medusa was but one of many hundreds of operations under Operation Enduring Freedom and the ISAF coalition. Yet it was the biggest fight either OEF or ISAF undertook there, with unique pressures and expectations. Among these were the constantly changing timeframes within which any action could be executed and, ultimately, judged to be effective or not. We wouldn’t know for days or weeks whether a specific military effort had been successful. The tangible benefit of any development project couldn’t be known for years. And whether our all-important capacity-building efforts have really made a difference can be judged only by future generations.
The chief impediment to our progress, of course, was the state of the nation. When we arrived in Afghanistan, its democratic government was only five years old. It was born in 2001 and—like any five-year old—was energetic and immature, despite a depth of culture that stretches back into ancient history. In hindsight our expectations in Afghanistan were wildly optimistic and certainly unrealistic, especially the timeframes within which we believed we’d see progress. A major obstacle to our understanding was our own lack of knowledge and understanding of the role of tribal culture and politics in Afghan society. Afghanistan does not exist in the minds of most Afghans; to them, their tribe is everything. Most locals do not travel outside of their tribal surrounds and are very much tied to the village of their birth. In Afghanistan today, as in Pakistan, the authority to govern comes from a nuanced interplay between an elected federal parliament and the varied systems embraced by the individual tribes whose members make up the population. And while the tribal elders have the moral authority of the people, the elected Afghan leaders control the resources the tribal elders need. We worked hard to bring both groups together and establish a means for them to work jointly for the benefit both of the tribes and of Afghanistan as a country. Early on we partnered with leaders such as Asadullah Khalid. We put their weaknesses aside; they were the people we had to work with. When I think back on them now, my chief memory is simply how courageous they had to be just to survive. Most did their best, by and large.
Much of our work took longer and was more complicated than could be explained by the embedded media. In most cases those reporters, as hard as they worked and as eager as they were to state the facts, did not report the bulk of what we were doing vis-à-vis development and capacity-building. Those topics were boring, alas. We were routinely disappointed that the headlines back in Canada and around the world were always about combat, as in the long run it was what we were building, not destroying, that mattered most to us.
Within our own coalition camps we had to learn how to work together as whole-of-government teams. Coming as we all did from nations where interdepartmental cooperation is expected and routine, one would think such collaboration would be straightforward even in the field. Wrong. Here’s a surprise: the complexity of joint action between governmental agencies from multiple countries working on foreign soil to serve populations whose languages they don’t understand on behalf of a nascent democracy at war with a terrorist insurgency using the proceeds of illegal drug production to acquire weapons from neighbouring states did not turn out to be as easy as our deputy ministers assumed. Every nation represented, despite all the chest-thumping about how great their campaign plans were, had to stumble for a while, and then invent a system with defined procedures by which their own institutions could work together. Great credit must go to the men and women on the ground who made it work, our own Simon Hetherington, Pamela Isfeld and Christina Green among them. They and their counterparts in other coalition nations resolutely pushed back up their respective chains of command for adjustments to enable them to get more done on the ground. In Ottawa key leaders were onboard; however, bureaucracies and procedures hamstrung everyone. Over time these issues were ameliorated, but the early rotations—including ours—had to endure the pain of building a concept of national operations from scratch.
The Canadian Army’s focus on battlegroup operations had worked well for decades, but Afghanistan changed the rules of the game. In the current operational environment, brigades must now be the lowest-level organizations to manage the resources needed for mission success. Intelligence, air space planning and coordination, Special Forces planning, logistics, medical planning and evacuation, whole-of-government collaboration, inter-agency coordination and coalition dynamics are just a few of the many higher-level activities that brigades can handle effectively, while they would overwhelm lower organizations. Afghanistan changed the paradigm, and the paradigm continues to evolve with every new threat.
On the military side, operating in combat once again illuminated some weaknesses in our design. Our leave policies posed a significant problem because, well, people went home on leave. Units had to manage more risk than planned for, because they were never fighting with full strength. We had understood this going in, of course. The real difficulty arose when NATO made assumptions about the combat-effective strength of our units based on their paper strength alone. Rotation lengths were another issue. Canada chose a six-month length of tour for fighting units and a ten-to-twelve-month tour for headquarters staff. This was a national decision that considered the effectiveness, health and morale of our soldiers in the field. The rationale was sound, but not everyone did as we did. Americans, for instance, kept their troops in theatre for twelve months, and they chose to increase that duration based on operational necessity twice during our own rotation. They found that soldiers who stayed longer were smarter, bolder, safer and more effective. Each tour comes in, picks up the rope from the previous tour, and pulls it until they hand it over to the next rotation. Rick Hillier was clear at the beginning that he wanted all of us to get away from thinking that each rotation was unique. Our mission needed continuity. We had to focus more on providing hope and opportunity to Afghans, and less on our own concerns. I don’t believe we ever achieved his intent in the duration of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.
Both OEF and ISAF adopted a philosophy called “Afghan lead.” It was the right approach. We went out on most (our aim was all) operations with an Afghan unit alongside us. When we went into a building, the aim was to have Afghans go in first. This sent a message to their people that they were not only part of the operation but were leading it. In reality, we did the bulk of the planning, although we did collaborate with the Afghan leadership as much as possible and within security constraints. The Afghan lead concept was not effective initially because of the lack of skill among the Afghans. When I went back for later visits, however, I saw demonstrable improvement with the Afghans planning, rehearsing and conducting operations on their own.
Back in 2006, the expectations we had about how much and how fast the Afghans could deliver were unrealistic. Much criticism has been levelled at Afghan leaders and organizations. Certainly there were many who were corrupt and incompetent, but we quickly learned who we could work with and who we should not, and things did get better as time went along. The situation evolved from us complaining “if only they were doing something” to exploring how they could get things done better. When I first met Governor Khalid, in the middle of a conversation he might answer his cell phone and race out of our meeting, pick up his AK-47 and rush to the scene of a firefight. Not what you would expect from one of our provincial leaders in Canada. With our guidance, Khalid began to work instead with his own chain of command, relying on his security force to brief him on plans and actions when events occurred. That was progress.
On another front, we were able to get the provincial development committee, the provincial coordination centre, district development assemblies, policy advisory groups and community development councils up and running, admittedly with varying degrees of success. We instituted an RC South Regional Governance Conference of agencies, which by the time we left met regularly on their own to share challenges and best practices. Not exciting stuff, but central to the foundation of a civil society, especially one as complex as this. During Operation Medusa, these institutions gave the people proof that their leaders were working on their behalf and helped them appreciate that those claiming to represent them would indeed take action against a determined enemy. Even better, they would win. Before Medusa, people had lost confidence in their leaders. As a subsequent national opinion survey revealed, by the time it was over that confidence had been re-established. That was one of the enduring benefits of the operation.
We certainly did not comprehend the Taliban yearly cycle when we arrived. Our plans were written under the presumption that the peak fighting season would be at the beginning of the summer each year, whereas when we actually fought them, we learned that their peak fighting period was during September and October. We came to that conclusion only late in the tour, by which time we were already into Operation Medusa. The news reports stated at the time that the insurgence was getting stronger. We knew where the Taliban were and what we needed to do. Just as a cancer-killing medicine will make a patient feel worse at first, our routing of the Taliban in RC South disturbed the people, the terrain, the dwellings and the economy. The southern provinces in general and Panjwayi in particular were the sanctuary in which the Taliban had long operated without interference. So things looked worse once we began. And the more we put pressure on them, the harder they came after us. We were playing chicken; the question was who would swerve first?
Taliban leaders who came from Pakistan were the true enemies. Among those who sided with them, the average fighter was nothing more than an impoverished Afghan trying to find a way to support a family. In no way were these people our enemy. Differentiating between the two groups was often impossible and caused us great anguish. We did everything we could not to rack up a body count. In return, they did their utmost to destroy and attack us wherever we were. The Taliban did everything to prove their superiority and discredit whatever we did. They ran a dirty campaign of innuendo and accusation against the Afghan authorities and the international coalition, who they painted as self-interested invaders. We built and rebuilt bridges and district centres over and over again, in part just to underscore the point that we were not going to be deterred. And we were not. Throughout the tour, culminating with Operation Medusa, the Taliban were defeated in every tactical engagement.
Contrary to what you see at the movies, no military operation goes perfectly. Far from it. The Taliban were a formidable, real-life enemy who had a strategy and knew their tactics. They were intent on taking the region and then the country. They were also agile. As we saw in August and September 2006, they could change their tactics radically to exploit what they perceived to be a weakness on our part, so we had to evolve just as rapidly when actions on the ground indicated a shift in their approach. Once you engage with the enemy, the key is to be guided by a plan that takes you to the desired outcome—in our case to defeat the enemy in Panjwayi. None of us believed that it would go smoothly. By this time in our tour we fully grasped the need for detailed and dynamic planning and nimble execution. After some early setbacks, we drove hard and took every opportunity to move forward. Not one of us had the advantage of complete information, context or understanding of the overall situation, but we did achieve what desperately needed to be done, albeit at a very high cost.
Medusa was a great success tactically and Canadians fought and died and succeeded, but like all battles, it had its moments. On occasions, it was a very close run and that’s war. The fact is they won. That’s what you’ve got to keep hanging on to. People came through and learned. Soldiers who on day one were scared shitless, by day eight were standing strong and effective in the middle of the Taliban position.
DAVID RICHARDS
Criticism of individuals during any operation, especially Operation Medusa, is unfair. The sheer complexity of this operation, the competing demands from nations, the enemy and the Afghan leadership meant that this fight was never going to be straightforward. At the battalion and task-force level, this was a tactical slog on difficult terrain against significant enemy numbers. At the regional and ISAF levels, this was tactical, strategic and political as nations declared what they could and could not do. The limitations on the scope of our activity, along with the restricted time we had to use our borrowed resources, made this difficult mission even harder to prosecute. Operation Medusa put pressure on everyone, and the higher up you went, the more complex the problem on the ground became.
Given the enemy and the changing conditions, it was not surprising that disagreements were commonplace. These were never personal and were always about difficult situations that involved national requirements, cultural ways of doing things, difficult decisions made under time constraints or high-risk situations. This was combat, and when everything was added up the pressures on everyone from the commanders all the way down to the soldier in the front line cannot be overstressed. I have never before or since felt that much pressure or been under the level of scrutiny to deliver effects in the craziest situations imaginable. You couldn’t make this stuff up. If in training we had received the scenarios we actually faced during our tour, we would have laughed.
But this was no laughing matter. In the middle of the fight during Operation Medusa, a British Nimrod aircraft crashed, killing all onboard. We dealt with death every day, managed political demands and time-constraint requirements, and sometimes, often, there were disagreements. Ben Freakley and I had many lively discussions. Omer and I had lively discussions. Ian and I had lively discussions. Every one of us no doubt had a lively discussion with everyone else in theatre at some stage or another. This was not Ottawa, Washington or London. This was combat, and people’s lives were at stake every day. Without frank discussion the outcomes could have been disastrous. The pressure and mental fatigue affected us all—commanders, staff and, most of all, our superb soldiers on the front lines. We all wanted to win and we all disagreed daily on how that should be done. Thank God we did. I can say with confidence that the final outcome of every situation was based on a combination of the opinions expressed.
NATO was not immune to the pressures of the theatre or mission. The coalition was tested through national rules of engagement, national caveats, limited capabilities, limited operational experience, and limitations in intelligence-sharing outside of the so-called five-eyes community of Americans, Brits, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. Operation Medusa provided something more than what was found on the battlefield. It provided SACEUR General Jim Jones with the ammunition to talk to the NATO coalition partners about stated and unstated limitations. Or, in plain language, what you say versus what you are prepared to deliver when it comes to the crunch. Little in NATO changed as a result of Operation Medusa, but our operation put the coalition on notice that troops in the field need the latitude and support to do what is necessary to fight the realities on the ground, particularly when in close combat. As for the troops on the ground, they all did what they were asked to do and succeeded in defeating the enemy.
Why did we succeed? Simply because we worked together. Working together and understanding the requirements ensured that things got done. The Canadians provided critical support to the inflow of the British in Helmand and the Dutch and Romanian troops into RC South. Both the Dutch and British were able to arrive without incurring any casualties. The Americans ensured that Canada had the capabilities we needed until our critical equipment arrived in theatre. The Americans, British and Dutch sent badly needed forces to the Operation Medusa fight. Without those resources we would not have had the force ratios necessary to deal with the Taliban.
The Afghan National Army developed the most during our time there. Under General Raufi the 205th Corps improved incrementally on many fronts. When we arrived, they had shown little or no planning capability; yet, when we left they had evolved a planning discipline. When I later returned once to visit they were conducting routine rehearsal of concept (ROC) drills and, by my second visit, were conducting major operations on their own. They weren’t perfect, but they were improving.
I am sorry to report that, in our time, the Afghan National Police were corrupt and, therefore, lacked credibility with the locals. No coalition soldier wanted to work with the ANP. They were unreliable and, more dangerously, an impediment to operations. The ANP was not a defined training priority when we arrived, and only in the later part of our tour did the Americans fund their development. As I had appreciated early on, policing should have been a priority. Thugs that they were, the Taliban posed both a community policing problem and a military threat. In such a scenario a competent police force working in partnership with a military coalition might have worked wonders.
The learning never stopped during the tour. Conflicts are evolutionary, and we had to evolve to meet the ever-changing enemy threat. We added new capabilities. We changed our equipment. We shifted our tactics. We picked up the pace of our thinking and acting to get ahead of the enemy and keep them off balance. Those who joined us without operational experience had to learn even more quickly than we had to. Whatever qualifications they brought with them meant nothing on their own; only front-line experience would make them smart, wary, tough and effective.
As one would expect, our experience subsequently informed the training of the Canadian military, training that became more demanding and more often conducted by those able to share their practical experience with the next crew destined to go into theatre. Training for operations always tends to focus on the last conflict, teaching the lessons learned from previous missions. But the operational tempo of training can seldom match that of combat.
One of the reasons we ran our close-protection training in the United States was to escape the nearly crippling Canadian overemphasis on what they considered safety which, while understandable, made running true reality-based training almost impossible.
ADAM “SEEGY” SEEGMILLER
While the stark pressure of real operations can rarely be replicated, any organization that does not try to do so will soon be schooled in their folly by an enemy who knows that pressure better. The Canadian Armed Forces learned and improved after Medusa. They adapted faster than I had ever seen in the twenty-five years of my military career.
Adam “Seegy” Seegmiller was one of those who joined us (we called them “augmentees”) following the tragic deaths of four of our comrades in April 2006. Seegy had an attitude that was simply contagious, and he fit in with the Posse with ease. Seegy managed what most augmentees could not—being wholly accepted by the family after a loss. He became one of our go-to lads, as he had a good tactical sense about him and was someone that I quickly got to know and rely upon. It was a joy to work with him.Credit 41
So was it worth it? Let’s consider that. Operation Medusa was a costly and necessary fight that achieved a temporary effect that allowed the coalition and the Afghans to move on. We did not lose this battle. Had we, the consequences would have been grave. The Taliban would have proven the inability of the Afghan leadership to govern; NATO would have been seen as an entity incapable of either protecting or fighting; Canada would have borne the brunt of the criticism for NATO’s failure; and certainly there would have been political fallout in Canada, the UK and the Netherlands, all of which were administered by minority governments at the time. Avoiding failure was more critical than winning, and we did not fail. The Afghan people saw their democratically elected leaders deploy a national army to protect the highest national goals during this battle. While conducted at great expense, Operation Medusa gave hope and opportunity to people, two precious gifts we all take for granted in Canada. The Canadian men and women who gave their lives did not die in vain, and those who were wounded may bear their scars with well-deserved pride. While the Taliban would come back more determined and in a form more sinister than before, using IEDs and suicide bombs with renewed determination, in Operation Medusa they had lost the hearts and minds of the Afghans.
At the time of writing, a legitimate, elected government of Afghanistan still continues to lead the country. The governments of Kandahar and all five other provinces in RC South are still securely in power. The nation’s security forces still stand guard. It did not have to end that well, but it did. The battle was messy, complicated, convoluted, political, tactical, dynamic and frustrating. It was what it was. We all fought through this and, in my view, came out the other side as winners. Not winners at the end of a game but winners of one hand in the middle of a very long game.