No Lack of Courage (23 page)

The 1 RCR BG was once again a key component of the operation. “Having sat on Route Summit for the better part of two months now they're anxious to do something,” opined Brigadier-General Grant. He ordered the 1 RCR BG to disrupt insurgent activity in order to set the conditions for the Kandahar City ADZ. The BG, in concert with U.S. and ANA forces, assaulted from east to west to secure villages in the Panjwayi Valley. Once the enemy was forced out of the valley the emphasis transitioned to humanitarian operations. Lieutenant-Colonel Lavoie clearly stated, “We're going to go in as soft as possible but as hard as necessary if they want to make it difficult on us.” His hope was to conduct the operation “less kinetic than we did in Medusa.”
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By 20 December, pronouncements emanating from RC(S) headquarters were positive. They assessed that Phases 1 and 2 of Operation Baaz Tsuka had significantly disrupted local insurgent command and control within the Zhari/Panjwayi region. Moreover, they received reports that insurgents were unsure of how to respond to the new offensive and that the will of the local fighters had started to wane. Intelligent analysts further assessed that insurgents were fleeing westward out of the AO.
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The operation once again seemed to provide the chimera of security in the area. It also provided the Government of Afghanistan and ISAF the opportunity to develop a series of fortified checkpoints, each
manned by six to eight ANSF personnel about five to seven kilometres apart along the main routes, as part of the long-term security program. But the long war continued. There was no peace. This, however, was nothing new. “There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier,” observed Sergei Akhrome'ev, the Soviet deputy minister of defence, in November 1986. “Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of the rebels . . . There is no single military problem that has arisen and that has not been solved, and yet there is still no result . . . The whole problem is in the fact that military results are not followed up by political.”
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The failure of reconstruction and development efforts to make significant inroads was as much a function of an inability to provide the necessary overarching security infrastructure as it was a failure of the Afghan government and the coalition to ensure good governance. “The lack of Afghan government presence and services, its inability to provide adequate security or improve the life of the average citizen with sufficient aid and revenues, [as well as] corruption and ethnic differences creates a vacuum threat forces can exploit,” counselled strategic analyst Anthony Cordesman. “Rampant corruption, absence of rule of law, and failure of Government to provide equitable social services are rapidly undermining Afghan popular support for democratic governance model and possibly foreign military presence.”
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Quite simply, success in the long war depends on the ability of the government to be credible. But, as the International Crisis Group reported, “Today, people are pulling back from a government that is failing them, if not preying on them.” A poll taken on 7 December 2006, demonstrated that Afghan “public optimism has declined sharply across Afghanistan.” Quite simply, public perception was that security was worsening and there was rising concerns about a resurgent Taliban, and decreasing faith in the government's effectiveness.
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Two weeks later another poll revealed that only 62 percent of Afghans believed that things were moving in the right direction in Afghanistan. Significantly, that was a dramatic 21 percent drop from the previous year.
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So who is winning the long war? “It's not a linear battlefield and it's much harder to measure progress,” stated Lavoie. “The enemy has all the
assets of an insurgent. One minute he has a hoe in his hand, the next minute it's an AK-47.”
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Ominously, the difficulty in measuring real success prompted some backward thinking. “We were asked to keep track of body counts of Taliban by higher HQ,” revealed Lieutenant-Colonel Schreiber, the operations officer at the RC(S) HQ. “We replied that this was meaningless—often inaccurate and it didn't matter anyways as it was not a measure of success. We were told to do it anyways because they needed something quantifiable to tell their higher.”
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And so the long war dragged on. “The Taliban is learning from their experience [in conflicts with ISAF] in the same way we are and we see increasing use of heavier weapons on their part,” stated Brigadier-General Joseph Votel, deputy commander of operations for ISAF's Regional Command East.
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Another veteran commander conceded, “This is a thinking enemy and we ignore that at our own peril.”
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“It's difficult, absolutely,” confessed Major Todd Scharlach. “They [Taliban] are a smart enemy, they know what they have to do and they're trying everything they can to hurt us.”
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Brigadier-General Fraser agreed. “The enemy is adaptive and intelligent,” he readily acknowledged.
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So, not surprisingly, the Taliban adjusted their methodology to maximize their tactical and strategic effect. For example, in 2005, there had been only 17 suicide attacks. “While there were just two suicide bombings in 2002, there is now one every five days,” reported Elizabeth Rubin on 29 October 2006.
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By the end of November, several months after Operation Medusa, there were a total of 106 suicide attacks.
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In December 2006, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., assessed, “The reconstituted enemy is more lethal and shows increased capacity for effective asymmetric warfare, including effective information operations.”
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Brigadier-General David Fraser, the brigade commander who was responsible for Operation Medusa, captured the frustration of the long war. “The battle was hard, but the reconstruction was harder.”
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Nonetheless he insisted, “We're getting this right. We just have to persevere and stick it out.”
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Fraser warned, however, that “the campaign to help build a nation will not be won this summer or next summer. It will take time . . . How much time? As long as it takes.”
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Fraser emphasized, “Counter-insurgency is a marathon—this is really hard stuff.”
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But to the soldiers the long war that played out after Operation Medusa boiled down to one simple realization: “You roll the dice with your life every time you go outside the wire,” stated one Canadian soldier without emotion.
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And there was little solace to be found in the assessment of Harvard scholar Michael Ignatieff, who announced that “the side that has the greatest willingness to take and inflict casualties in real war is the side that is most likely to prevail.”
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And so the long war continues.

The ongoing debate over Afghanistan is a difficult one. There are as many proponents declaring doom and gloom as there are those professing progress and victory. In the aftermath of Operation Medusa it becomes a quandary. Is the glass is half full or half empty? The Afghanistan Study Group claimed that 2007 was the deadliest year for coalition troops in Afghanistan since 2001. It noted that violence continued to escalate in 2008 with a 30 percent increase in violence nationwide.
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In October 2008, two years after Operation Medusa, two high-ranking coalition officers stated that the war is not winnable. British Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, Britain's top military officer in Afghanistan, publicly said that people should “lower their expectations” with regards to how the conflict in Afghanistan would end. “We're not going to win this war,” he bluntly stated. “It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan Army.” Several days later he was supported by the head of France's military, General Jean-Louis Georgelin, who commented frankly, “[the British officer] was saying that one cannot win this war militarily, that there is no military solution to the Afghan crisis and I totally share this feeling.”
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Their underlying message was reinforced several months later. In December, Norine MacDonald, president and lead field researcher of the International Council on Security and Development, formerly known as the Senlis Council, insisted, “the West is in genuine danger of losing Afghanistan.”
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All of these assessments pale in light of announcements made by the vice president of the United States and the prime minister of Canada in March 2009. Joe Biden unambiguously stated, “We are not winning the war in Afghanistan,” and Steven Harper declared, “We are not ever going to defeat the insurgents.”
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These assessments were not much different from the observations of the ISAF commander. In September 2009, American General Stanley McChrystal noted, “Eight years of individually successful kinetic actions have resulted in more violence.”
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A month later he acknowledged that the insurgency was growing. He concluded that success could not be taken for granted.
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In fact, in November 2009, NATO conceded that 30 percent of Afghanistan was under strong Taliban leadership.
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Other analysts declared that half of Afghanistan was either contested or controlled by the Taliban.
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By the spring of 2010, declarations that the war was unwinnable and that negotiations with the Taliban should be considered no longer created a backlash of indignation. It was generally accepted as a reality and as a possible exit strategy for Western nations embroiled in Afghanistan.
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So the question must be asked: was Operation Medusa a wasted effort? Brigadier-General Fraser would argue that it was not. He noted that he had “no regrets about his decisions [and] at the end of the day, the measure of success was who won and who lost.” Fraser unequivocally asserted, “We won, they lost.”
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Later he admitted, “It was one of the hardest things we've done for a very long time. Canada led the operation, NATO's biggest one ever, and successfully defeated the Taliban in this area. Canada did what was right and the cost was not insignificant.”
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Importantly, he professed, “Every life given here, every soldier that is wounded and will live for the rest of his life with scars, either physical or mental, has to understand that what he or she did here this summer and this fall meant something.”
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Of course he was right. And it did mean something; as many proponents of success in Afghanistan have argued, Operation Medusa supported, if not invigorated, important advancements. By 7 September 2007, a year later, six million children were able to attend school. In Kandahar alone there were 4,000 community-based schools. In addition there were 9,000 teachers trained; literacy courses established
for 6,400 people, including 5,400 women; 544 infrastructure projects completed in Kandahar (including construction of over 1,100 wells, 800 hand pumps, four large reservoirs, three water supply networks, 150 kilometres of new roads, four bridges, 50 kilometres of power lines, 10 transformers, 42 power generators, and 142 kilometres of irrigation systems); close to 6,000 kilometres of rehabilitated roads were completed; and 1.2 billion square metres of land was cleared of mines. Moreover, the coalition assisted with the election and employment of 400 local officials in Kandahar and is now training about 2,000 ANA soldiers per month.
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Equally important, according to senior political and military decision makers, was the fact that Operation Medusa was an important strategic and psychological victory. “Operation Medusa, in the south, was a near-conventional military operation initiated by Taliban insurgents who, quite mistakenly, believed that the newly arrived NATO forces would not fight. They were wrong, and they suffered a major tactical defeat, the effects of which significantly restricted their capabilities to mount a Spring Offensive in 2007,”
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explained General Jones. Crucially, Operation Medusa, on the surface at any rate, demonstrated that NATO could and would fight.
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Official NATO pronouncements declared, “NATO launched its largest ever combat operation, against a well-prepared and determined enemy. It was fought to the south west of Kandahar City, in the Panshwaye and Zhari Districts. It was here that the Taliban filtered in large numbers of insurgents in to first taken and then, far more significantly, hold the area. It was a trial of strength that will have a lasting effect both militarily and on the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.”
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Significantly, Afghan experts and analysts publicly recognized that Operation Medusa rescued Afghanistan from the tipping point.

A third, and equally significant, impact of Operation Medusa was that it signalled to allies and the Canadian public that the national peacekeeper myth was dead. Canada was once again prepared to deliberately send its sons and daughters into combat. In simplest terms, Canada reiterated its status, earned in blood and tears on so many foreign battlefields throughout its history, as a fighting nation. This was not missed
by our allies. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated, “They've [Taliban] learned a tough lesson that the Canadians are fierce fighters.”
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Similarly, Australian Prime Minister John Howard acknowledged, “Canada is carrying a very heavy burden in Afghanistan.”
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And he was right. In 2006, Canada led in troop fatalities in Afghanistan as a percentage of troops deployed. Canada had 5.1 percent fatalities, the U.K. 3.6 percent, and the U.S. 2.5. When troop fatalities and wounded were factored, Canada had a 23.9 percent casualty rate compared to 18.3 and 14.3 for the U.K. and U.S. respectively. The European allies were not even close.
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