Canadians continue to grind down Taliban

Washington Post:

The company of Canadian soldiers set off from the small base in southern Afghanistan a few hours before dawn. Combat boots crunching along the wide plains of the Kandahar desert, they moved slowly in a long line into the moonless black ahead.

No one said a word as they picked their way across an old cemetery. The soldiers strained to hear any sound of approaching insurgents above the slap of funeral flags in the crisp autumn wind. Someone at the head of the line motioned them forward. A few dozen yards later, they stopped again.

The soldiers' target, a Taliban bomb-supply compound, was only a little more than two miles away. But it took the contingent of 200-plus troops about three hours to march from the cemetery to the insurgent stronghold. That is the way the war is being fought in southern Afghanistan: inch by inch.

The pace is frustratingly slow for many of the 2,500 Canadian troops fighting to break the Taliban's hold on Kandahar. The insurgents move swiftly under cover through much of the province. But for the Canadians, every tactical wiggle in Kandahar involves days of planning and dozens -- sometimes hundreds -- of soldiers.

...

"The bottom line in Zhari and Panjwai is that we own about a third of those districts. The other two-thirds aren't owned by the Taliban, but I call them contested," Thompson said. "If you're out there, you're going to get into a scrap. There are firefights, and there's combat every day in Zhari and Panjwai."

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It was a bomb-making network that Canadian troops were after when they set out on foot in the darkness from a small, fortified military base in western Kandahar last week. Intelligence sources had pinpointed a Taliban compound at the western edge of Zhari that appeared to be a supply base for a key leader of such a network. "Megaman" was suspected of being behind many of the bomb attacks on Canadian troops over the past several months. No one had ever seen Megaman, so it was unclear what chance the soldiers had of capturing him. But their main objective was clear: to destroy the compound.

The soldiers plodded on. Soon, the desert plain gave way to fields of grapevines. One by one, the troops scrambled up and down the muddy rows of hillocks. They were deep in Taliban territory now, slowly zigzagging through Zhari, hoping the insurgents would not hear them coming.

The first shot rang out a little before first light as dozens of Canadian soldiers crept to the edge of a wide irrigation ditch. Someone shot a wild dog that was attacking a group of soldiers approaching the main compound. Two helicopters swooped overhead. A contingent of Canadian tanks rumbled loudly over the fields in the distance. An Afghan interpreter shouted into a megaphone that anyone in the compound should come out unarmed. The show of force was met with silence.

The only sign of insurgents was the frantic chatter that crackled over a radio monitored by an Afghan interpreter with the Canadian troops. As the Canadians pushed deeper into the web of Taliban compounds surrounding their objective, a panicked voice commanded someone to move the bombs out of the compound. The radio went dead for a few minutes. Then came the crack, crack, crack of automatic gunfire. A rocket-propelled grenade landed a few hundred feet from a line of Canadian soldiers returning fire into the leafy thicket of grape fields.

The firefight was over in minutes. The Taliban fighters faded into the countryside as the Canadians poured into the compound, which was packed with dozens of huge mortar shells, ammunition shells and what appeared to be ingredients for homemade bombs. After a careful sweep of the area, Canadian military engineers set charges around the bomb storage site and the compound was blown up.

After their return to the base, Lt. Col. Roger Barrett, the Canadian battle group commander, appeared pleased with the results. He wore a confident smile as he surveyed the troops lounging in the sun and guzzling Gatorade after the operation. It had taken about 230 ground troops and 150 troops in the battle group's mechanized division to strike the Taliban compound. Megaman had escaped capture, but there wasn't a single Canadian casualty.

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It is an interesting operation and it has to be frustrating to the Taliban to lose much of their logistics for war making and not inflict any casualties. The story does not mention any UAVs. I get the impression the Canadians do not have enough UAVs to make this type of operation easier. In fact a Predator could probably have destroyed the compound and its munitions with a couple of Hellfires and not put the soldiers at risk.

NATO needs more troops in the area to work with the Canadians. The reasons there are still large areas that are being contested is that we have an inadequate number of troops to control the areas and we do not have an effective counterinsurgency program that will help villagers resist the Taliban.

The Canadians have been good allies in Afghanistan, especially since Harper came to power. It is too bad that some of our other NATO allies have not made a similar contribution.

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