No Lack of Courage (18 page)

The assessment, however, is subjective. The local Afghans had a completely different perspective. “The bombing and the fighting destroyed our mosque, our homes and our vineyards,” said one farmer. “The Taliban are gone, but so is most everything else.”
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Haji Abdullah Shah stated, “The cause of the fighting was the Taliban, but with the bombing NATO made big mistakes . . . They killed our children, they killed our families. Every canal is collapsed. Every field needs water. We don't have enough food.”
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Abdul Hai lamented, “We have only dirt, nothing else.”
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Similarly, the long-term impact is more difficult to assess. The Taliban attempt at concentrating and holding ground was convincingly defeated. However, being an adaptive and clever foe, they analyzed their recent defeat and quickly concluded their future survival and success depended on an asymmetric approach to fighting the ANSF and coalition forces. This knowledge made them a far more significant threat and effective insurgent force. Brigadier-General Fraser explained:

An official Canadian report agreed. “It is expected that the kinetic effects of OP Medusa will be transitory,” it stated. “The TB [Taliban] has demonstrated that they are adept at infiltrating fighters into the region and it is expected that enemy force numbers will be replenished in the coming months. Consequently, there is no belief that the TB movement has been defeated in Kandahar Province, nor in RC(S) . . . Ironically, there is some unofficial suggestion that the TB will enter into a more dangerous posture reverting back to terrorist tactics involving the use of suicide bombers and IEDs to inflict casualties on ISAF forces.”
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And then there was some question as to how many of the Taliban had escaped. How decisive was the defeat of the Taliban? Lieutenant-Colonel Lavoie commented on the ability to “cut-off” the enemy. He noted in an insurgency that is very difficult to accomplish. “That's probably one of the weaknesses in the plan overall,” he conceded. “There was never really a plan to cut them off, to prevent them from seeping out and escaping.” The coalition forces pushed from the north and the southeast, but in the end it came down to tactical aviation to tighten the cordon and prevent enemy from leaking out because there were not enough ground forces to do the job. NATO's failure, or more accurately the failure of European
countries, to step up and commit combat troops to the fight resulted in an inability to close the trap.

Lavoie confirmed that there was an overreliance on tactical aviation to prevent the Taliban from escaping to the west. “Although tac[tical] aviation intercepted, killed and destroyed quite a few of them there were still quite a lot who escaped.” He added, “We really needed a ground force to be put in there, but it comes down to the fact that we really didn't have the forces to do it.”
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The other problem the BG CO observed was that of identifying the enemy. “I had a sub-unit screening my left flank 15–20 kilometres away and their job was to contain the seepage,” he stated. “They could just report that 30 fighting age ‘farmers' were leaving the area, but in accordance with their rules of engagement, because they were unarmed, they couldn't engage them.” The frustrated CO questioned, “What could you do to these guys? . . . You were always certain that they were Taliban, but they're just walking down the highway.”
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As a result, in the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Schreiber, “the enemy [could] just melt away.”
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Lavoie explained that it is cases such as this where host-nation forces from the ANSF are critical. “They are culturally familiar with their fellow countrymen and always seem to have a sixth sense,” he stated. “These guys [ANSF], either through intuition or certainly after talking to suspects, just know that they're not farmers . . . we [coalition forces] just can't do that.” For precisely that reason, Lavoie argued that all operations must be done in conjunction with host-nation forces. “We need the ANSF to act as cut-off groups,” he insisted, “so that they can question and identify individuals fleeing a combat area.”
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But the problem was simply a dire shortage of ANSF available to assist.

The enemy seepage was frustrating to the Canadian soldiers, but so was the subsequent exploitation. “We cleared large areas such as Siah Choy and left sub-units there,” explained Lieutenant-Colonel Lavoie, “but then Brigade ordered them out and the Taliban flowed in immediately behind the withdrawing troops.” He grimaced. “Now we must go and retake them again, compound by compound . . . the worst part in Siah Choy was that the population started to warm up and support us but once we abandoned them the Taliban returned and killed those who were friendly.”
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From Lieutenant-Colonel Lavoie's perspective the operation should have continued until the whole campaign was complete. He felt the battle group “should have exploited another 20 kilometres to actually seal off an area to disrupt their [Taliban] lines of communication.”
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He acknowledged that that meant there would have been a lot more fighting at the time, “but we had them on the run and we probably could have kept that pursuit and then actually held the ground we seized and put the Taliban in a position where they would not have been unable to come back into the area.” He concluded, “That would have saved us from our current position where we are going back into the same ground we had already cleared . . . I'm trying to impress upon them [higher headquarters] that we just don't want to disrupt Taliban operations, we actually want to clear and secure the area and prevent the reoccupation [by the Taliban] down the road.” He concluded, “In a non-linear battlefield, exploitation is much more important and more complex—it's not about just capturing a piece of ground.”
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Nonetheless, Lieutenant-Colonel Omer Lavoie and his TF rolled into Phase IV of Operation Medusa after defeating the entrenched Taliban forces in a bitter struggle. In his formal war diary entry Omer Lavoie wrote, “It will take several months to repair the damage done to the local villages in Pashmul and surrounding area but with the Taliban routed from there and my centre of gravity secured once again, I can now begin looking at strengthening the zone around Kandahar City and shifting back to pre-Medusa dispositions.”
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But, Lavoie was not misled by what he and his soldiers accomplished. “Phase IV of Operation Medusa, reconstruction, is the most important, that will actually defeat vice just killing the enemy,”
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he commented.

But Lavoie was not convinced that the security conditions necessary for reconstruction were entirely met. Despite Lavoie's concern, ISAF declared victory and placed an emphasis on returning the civilian population to the area and creating freedom of action for the GoA and development agencies in order to set the necessary preconditions for the establishment of the Kandahar Advanced Development Zone. As always, higher headquarters focus more on the operational and strategic requirements and tend not to get mired in the tactical battle. As such, as
far as they were concerned they had declared victory and it was time to move on with reconstruction.

However, the Taliban was not convinced that they had been defeated. And they were not prepared to surrender the Pashmul area to the Government of Afghanistan or the coalition forces. One Taliban fighter stated, “No Muslim wants the human garbage of foreign soldiers in Afghanistan.” He explained, “We were ready to fight, but there was lots of bombs, lots of dust. It was hard to see. So we decided to fight somewhere else.”
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Another Taliban insurgent, named Ashoor, laughed, “You cannot stop us. We've been using these tactics for hundreds of years and they have always worked. . . . After an attack fighters can easily stash their weapons among villagers sympathetic to their cause [and] they can then melt in with the local population and move on to another village, where there are more caches of weapons available to them for mounting another attack.”
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So, despite the declaration of victory there was some confusion about the long-term impact or whether the successful actions by Canadian and coalition forces in Pashmul between 3 and 14 September 2006 actually constituted a victory. Although they had soundly defeated the Taliban's attempt at concentrating forces and holding ground, they had also pushed the Taliban to evolve into a much more dangerous and difficult foe to fight. In essence, Operation Medusa forced the Taliban to adopt asymmetric attacks as their operational methodology. The fight was about to evolve into a much more complex, frustrating, difficult, and dangerous war.

Courtesy 1 RCR BG.

Preparatory bombardment. Objective Rugby is pounded by artillery and close air support, 2 September 2006.

B. Horn photo.

1 RCR BG LAV IIIs on Ma'SÅ«m Ghar. Evidence of the construction of the location as a more permanent FOB is apparent in the background.

Courtesy 1 RCR BG.

The killing grounds of Bayenzi. The shattered remnants of the white schoolhouse are still clearly visible.

Courtesy “B” Coy, 1 RCR BG.

Elements of 23 Field Engineer Squadron use a dozer to clear a breach on “Cracked Roof” to allow “B” Coy LAV IIIs to advance to support the next tactical bound.