by Graeme Smith
The situation did fall apart in Zabul during the following years. Violence in that province grew exponentially, and much of it became off limits for aid workers. But the same kind of deterioration swept over all provinces in the south, so it’s impossible to know whose strategy was better. The commanders who implemented these strategies were literate men, well versed in the history of other insurgencies. Stacks of non-fiction in their offices made them seem like warrior-professors who could spend hours talking about Roman methods of subduing rebellious tribes. Of course, Roman legions never faced roadside bombs. The history books also failed, apparently, to teach the modern officers any lessons about the dangers of convenient hope. Most personnel in the NATO mission seemed to genuinely believe that the insurgents were growing desperate, on the verge of breaking. It was such a stubbornly optimistic atmosphere that a bright young commander could stand near a troop carrier spattered with human remains and declare victory. This same blinkered view of the situation would soon lead the NATO troops, stumbling, into their biggest battle ever.
Canadian soldier in Operation Medusa
CHAPTER 4
MEDUSA AUGUST 2006
A sense of anticipation hung over Kandahar city in late summer, something heavy in the terrible heat. The violence had continued rising through the hottest months of the year, and now all eyes looked nervously west, toward the Panjwai river valley, where hundreds of armed Taliban camped among the lush orchards and grape fields. The gunmen weren’t far from downtown, maybe ten kilometres beyond the bridge that marked the city limits, and fears were spreading about a military confrontation in the city streets. Most residents had memories of urban warfare in past decades, and nobody wanted to see that kind of fighting again. My translator kept his car filled with gasoline and his suitcases packed, ready to escape. Others had already fled. The smog of diesel and smoke from cooking fires had thinned; cresting a hill on my way into the city, I enjoyed an unusually clear view of the Eid Gah mosque on the opposite side of town, its dome like a blue egg among the mud buildings. Beyond that, I could see the jagged rock that rises almost vertically to the west and north of the city, small mountains that had made Kandahar a natural fortress for centuries. Now those mountains seemed to offer little defence against insurgents who slipped easily across the landscape. Along the highway, rows of vendors’ stalls had lost their bustle. We passed the wreckage of a taxi, with scattered shoes and human gristle in the dust, the remnants of an explosion. Drivers did not pause to gawk, slowing only to avoid holes carved by the blasts. Insurgents attacked so many times with so-called improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that the airport road was nicknamed “IED alley.” My driver somehow believed we could avoid the bombs if we drove quickly, making the trip from the airport a terrifying dash through traffic, past herds of goats and the occasional camel. Inside the city, many storefronts were shuttered with locked metal blinds; these were usually businesses marked by the taint of Western influence—medical clinics, computer stores, sellers of audio cassettes and compact discs—whose owners worried the Taliban might not tolerate them. In the years since President Hamid Karzai and his Popalzai tribe had assumed control of Kandahar, merchants had started advertising their connection to the ruling clan by adding the tribal name to their shop signs, and it sometimes seemed as if every bakery and auto mechanic was owned by somebody ostensibly named Popal. But during the sweltering final weeks of summer, the hand-painted “Popal” signs had disappeared. It was better to hide your loyalties in a city on the brink of invasion.
As business slowed, the remaining shopkeepers found themselves with plenty of time to drink tea and complain. Some admitted they were taking out extra insurance against Taliban attack by sending gifts to the well-known insurgent commanders in the fields outside the city. Merchants assembled little packets of cash, or vouchers for cellphone credit, wrapped up in scarves and presented with compliments. I understood this as pragmatism. Who wouldn’t want to protect themselves against armed zealots? Almost every building in the city wore the scars of previous wars, and men with missing legs hobbled on wooden crutches or wheeled themselves along the rutted alleyways in hand-cranked contraptions. It made sense that city residents would have psychological scars as well. I did not want to believe that an average person in Kandahar would willingly sponsor the death of foreign soldiers, or that gifts for the Taliban represented votes in favour of the brutal movement. If ordinary citizens were helping the insurgents, I guessed, the climate of fear must be making people crazy.
So I went to see a psychologist. Abdul Rahim Halimyar, forty-eight, ran the only mental health clinic in the city, although it looked more like a drug dealer’s lair than a medical establishment. That impression proved correct, in some ways, because Dr. Halimyar’s practice consisted mostly of prescribing mind-dulling medication. It was amazing that his dazed patients could even reach his office, up a steep flight of stone steps to the second floor of an old building in the central market. The waiting area was crowded and dirty. Behind a stained lace curtain, in his tiny consulting room, the doctor whisked around with a theatrical air, wearing a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck. His scraggly hair, gap-toothed smile and bloodshot eyes made him look like an avatar for all the madness of the city. I asked him whether anxiety levels were rising in Kandahar, and he strongly agreed. I’d assumed he would criticize the Taliban for causing the distress, but instead he blamed outsiders for meddling in his country. His patients had lost hope for the international mission, he said. “They hear on the radio that the whole world is trying to help Afghanistan, but they see no improvement. I’m a doctor, I’m educated, and they always ask me. I tell them, no, please don’t hope. It will get worse.” I wanted to chronicle the ways his patients suffered, the psychological effects of slain relatives, smashed homes, harrowing escapes. He preferred to rant about the foreigners’ mistakes. “Ninety per cent of women here are happy with the burka,” he said. “But the foreigners are saying they’re not happy with this clothing.” That evening, back in my tent at the military base, I omitted those quotes from my article about his clinic. They didn’t fit my story about a city under siege by unwelcome militants.
But, in some ways, a siege mentality had taken hold. I was driving through the northeastern side of the city when I heard an explosion from the direction of a nearby NATO military base. This was followed by a crackle of bullets, and everybody on the street appeared to reach the same conclusion at once: the Taliban had finally started their urban war. People ran for their lives, running so hard they left their sandals behind. I jumped out of my car and walked against the flow, getting closer to the thick column of smoke billowing into the blue sky. I could see foreign soldiers taking shelter behind a mud wall as a flurry of concussions threw up more dust. “The Taliban are attacking the city,” a teenager shouted. My driver, a brave ex-soldier, tugged at my sleeve. He didn’t speak English but I understood his growl, “Razi che zhu!” (“Let’s go!”) We joined the mob hurrying away.
But we had all misunderstood: it was just another suicide bomber, one of dozens in the city that summer. The bomb detonated near a military vehicle and set it on fire. The rapid pops and banging sounds had been caused by the ignition of overheated ammunition inside the burning vehicle, a phenomenon known as a “cook-off.” A soldier was killed in the attack, and the troops who rushed to the scene accidentally shot dead a young boy. The Taliban were not invading after all, but tension in the city had reached a fever pitch.
Everybody knew a battle was coming, but it still felt like high drama when the international troops finally declared war. NATO had formally taken responsibility for southern Afghanistan earlier that month, and Kandahar’s main base now included troops from Canada, Britain, Australia, Denmark, Romania, Estonia, Portugual and the Netherlands. But it was an American commander, Colonel Steve Williams, who served as the voice of the coalition during a press conference at the end of August. He warned villagers west of the city to evacuate immediately because of an impending as
sault. It was easy to guess why the American had been selected to deliver the message: other countries in the NATO alliance were describing their presence as a humanitarian gesture. A British minister infamously predicted the military surge would happen without a shot fired, and the Canadian military was pushing journalists to write about medical programs. By contrast, the Americans advertised their willingness to draw blood. The US colonel aimed his words directly at the insurgents: “If they want to die, stay,” he said. “If they don’t want to die, give up.” This prompted a look of discomfort from a Canadian press officer, who immediately tried to soften the message.
“I would simply add that …” he said.
“I thought that answered it pretty good,” said the American colonel, with a smile at the journalists. The Afghan press didn’t get the joke, however, because to them the differences among the foreigners were hard to understand. They found it difficult to imagine that English-speaking soldiers who wore similar uniforms, carried the same weapons and fought on the same side would have fundamental disagreements about the war. They saw all of us as Americans. (For years, people in Kandahar city would look at me and ask, “Amerika-yeh?” and it was hard to persuade them I was from Canada—and then, to convince them Canada was a real country.) Besides, the Afghan journalists were more interested to know why the international troops had waited so long before deciding to attack the insurgents, who had been a threat near the city for months. A local correspondent from the Associated Press said bluntly, “How come the coalition forces didn’t do anything?”
It wasn’t only journalists asking that question: Afghan politicians were also worried about their enemies gathering outside the city. One influential member of the provincial council had recently been forced to evacuate more than sixty members of his family from the Panjwai valley, marking the first time in decades of war that his family had been uprooted. Nor was the pressure coming only from local sources: NATO itself seemed to feel its pride was at stake in the fields west of Kandahar city, as the sudden appearance of massed Taliban coincided with NATO forces taking over control of the south from the Americans. There was talk among military officers about the insurgents testing the resolve of the Canadians and Europeans, and the need for NATO to prove its potency on the battlefield. Military officials described something they called the “weakest link” theory, suggesting that the Taliban was pushing hard against the mixed NATO contingent in the belief that soft liberal democracies would not have the stomach for war. But the threat was also viewed in some circles as a rare opportunity to kill large numbers of Taliban in a single operation: usually preferring guerilla tactics, the insurgents had rarely offered themselves up for a conventional military battle. The prospect excited a generation of military leaders who had spent their lives studying classic manoeuver warfare—but never experiencing it. Like the NATO alliance itself, the soldiers wanted to show their mettle.
That feeling of urgency may have contributed to NATO’s missteps in the next few days, during the start of an offensive named Operation Medusa. A detailed analysis of the operation, published a year later by the journalist Adam Day in Legion magazine, would conclude that foreign troops rushed the initial stage of the fight with “little if any battle procedure, no reconnaissance and intel that was either insufficient or wildly wrong.” The international side of the battle consisted of about fourteen hundred regular troops, mostly Canadian, with smaller contingents of special forces and Afghan soldiers. Estimates of the Taliban ranks were varied, but speculation at the time placed their numbers at roughly half the strength of the foreign troops. The insurgents had tunnelled defensive shelters and anti-tank trenches into the hard earth of the Panjwai valley, and the landscape favoured the defenders, with a warren of irrigation ditches, underground water channels, and vineyards with grapes climbing rows of chest-high troughs in the ground. The mud walls offered unexpectedly good cover: troops were surprised when a blast from their turret cannon, which fires heavy slugs at more than eleven hundred metres per second, failed to punch through a wall constructed of dirt and straw.
To break down those defences, NATO surrounded the Taliban and pounded them with air strikes and artillery. The valley had been blanketed with warnings on radio and leaflets beforehand, and military leaders declared that no civilians likely remained in the target zone, a rectangular swath of roughly twenty square kilometres. Any women and children still inside that part of the Panjwai could be considered “camp followers” of the insurgents, they claimed, noting that thousands of residents had already evacuated. That zone became the most closely monitored patch of earth in Afghanistan, as military surveillance focused on the battlefield, a deployment of intelligence assets that resulted in the first casualties of the operation. Ground troops watched in horror as a British spy plane fell out of the sky in a streak of fire. The crash killed fourteen personnel, the largest single loss for British forces in decades. On the same day, September 2, most of the NATO force was assembling itself in a U-shaped horseshoe pattern around the target area, with the open side of the “U” facing away from Kandahar city. Military commanders at the time boasted about encircling the insurgents, but that was bluster; all signs pointed to a massive push to drive the insurgents away, via the loosely guarded western edge of the battlefield. It was reasonable to think the Taliban would retreat, surrounded on three sides and enduring a barrage of NATO firepower.
I embedded with a unit on the north side of the “U” formation, Bravo Company of the Royal Canadian Regiment, which initially stayed back from the target area. Sitting on the roof of an Afghan police station, I watched the explosions in the valley, making deep sounds like the rumble of a thunderstorm. But soldiers would later complain that some of the planned air strikes never arrived. Even more baffling for them was the decision to rush ahead with the ground offensive on September 3, two days ahead of schedule, skipping forty-eight hours of bombardment. This led to a bloody debacle that has become celebrated in Canadian military lore, in which Charles Company charged north across the Arghandab River into a hail of enemy fire on that Sunday morning at daybreak. Of the fifty soldiers who crossed the river, four were killed, ten were wounded and others required treatment for stress. It was heroic, but they gained nothing. The commanders fed us journalists the usual lines: “It was an extremely successful day,” Brigadier-General David Fraser said, after his soldiers retreated.
Despite their casualties, Charles Company was again selected the next morning to lead an assault on the Taliban stronghold. They gathered on a hillside on the south bank of the river in the early mist, but a US warplane accidentally strafed them just minutes before the attack. The American A-10 doesn’t so much fire bullets as belch them out like dragon fire, and it makes an eerie prehistoric howling sound in the sky. The errant blast would have killed more troops if the company hadn’t already been suited up for battle; even so, it left one soldier dead and a few dozen wounded. I could hear the commander of Canada’s battle group, Lieutenant-Colonel Omer Lavoie, who had warned his bosses not to rush the battle, cursing on the radio. “Fuck, we just lost a whole company,” he said. Charles Company would later become the most highly decorated unit in the Canadian military, but for the moment it was a shambles.
The plan to attack from the south was scrapped, and officers started to talk about sending Bravo Company from the north. The men seemed nervous. An officer complained over the radio: “I just don’t get what’s not being understood. We need a lot more resources to do what we have to do, especially after the events of this morning.” The Canadians’ big artillery pieces, which had been banging shells into the Taliban stronghold for days, were running low on ammunition. In the beginning the soldiers had been cheering as American planes dropped bombs into the valley, payloads so heavy that the sound hit you in the sternum, dusty mushrooms of smoke blotting out the mountains. But now, after the friendly fire, the torrent of air power seemed like just another threat to soldiers on the ground. They took extra care to mark themselves with infrared
light emitters in hopes of being noticed by pilots’ night-vision gear, using empty water bottles strapped to their vehicles as holders for glow sticks, tubes of plastic that don’t give off any light to the naked eye but show up on military sensors. Some soldiers grumbled about sending an even clearer message to the pilots. “We should spray-paint a big circle around us, with an arrow that says, ‘Not here, asshole,’ ” one soldier said.
That day, and the next, and the next, the troops stayed on the fringes of the valley and watched the pyrotechnics of aircraft and artillery strikes. The soldiers woke before dawn every morning and waited for the order to attack, but it seemed the new plan was still being formulated at higher levels. The Taliban sometimes poked out from among the trees and fired toward the armoured vehicles, but the skirmishes didn’t amount to much. I got so comfortable on the front lines that I made the mistake of loitering in the open scrubland only a few hundred metres from Taliban positions, and an insurgent took a shot in my direction: it was my first time hearing a bullet go past my ear. The smack of the tiny sonic boom sounded so much like somebody clapping their hands behind my head that I was initially puzzled, and turned around to see which prankster made the sudden noise, only to discover that the soldiers had thrown themselves to the ground. I joined them, embarrassed but lucky. That night, of course, I didn’t mention the near miss when I pulled the small satellite dish from my backpack, aimed it at the stars and huddled inside an armoured vehicle to write my sister.
