Canadian money built and opened that school, but Canadian troops were not around to defend it when the Taliban booby-trapped it in 2006 and left letters saying anyone who tried to take it back would be murdered. If Dog Company takes the school back, sooner or later the insurgents will do the same. What’s needed is a commitment from the Afghan government to keep it open, backed by Afghan National Army troops who will be vigilant long after Jeremiah Ellis goes home.
He’s pleaded for help, he told Leslie. The Afghan police, poorly equipped and often corrupt, have been no help. “They’d show up, kick a dog, steal an apple, not do much.” It’s the Afghan army, rapidly growing and professionalizing, that’s needed. “Until then, that school sits as a monument,” Ellis said. “It sits there as a monument to the fact that their government won’t do anything for them.”
This conviction that the first job of soldiers is to vouchsafe the essentials of a civil society was clear everywhere we travelled. Near the village of Nakhonay we visited Combat Outpost Shkarre, built around a single-storey building of dried mud and grass the Taliban were using, only months ago, as an outpost to trigger roadside bombs to destroy passing traffic.
The soldiers of Delta Company’s 11 Platoon have only lately installed working hot showers in the yard. Our convoy stayed overnight, sleeping on cots under the stars. For Capt. James O’Neill, 11 Platoon’s commander, the main goal is to keep local “FAMs”—fighting-age males in their late teens and twenties—busy with construction and irrigation projects so life in the area would improve and the FAMs would be harder to lure into the insurgency.
“I remember when I was in work-up training, thinking, ‘What is this COIN shit?,’ ” O’Neill said, using military slang for counterinsurgency. “I’d say, ‘We’re Canadian Forces, let’s just kill the enemy.’ ” But these days the overwhelming majority of IEDs Delta Company disposes in the area are those turned in by local residents. That only happens because the Canadian soldiers and the villagers have worked together and grown to trust one another. It makes everybody safer.
Menard’s enthusiasm for the strategy of keeping on the population’s good side is endless. He’s poured huge resources into basic irrigation and road building. “You’ve seen water like probably you’ve never seen in the past,” he said, referring to the reappearance after many years’ absence of verdant farmlands in Arghandab, just north of Kandahar. “I’m still digging and clearing canals so that farmers can have some water so they can farm. It’s as simple as this. I’m trying to give the obvious a big place. I’m not suggesting this is very brilliant. But that’s what I’m doing and it’s working. We are in a position now to reinforce what they want. They’re not after, you know, solar-powered lights or whatever. They want water.”
The focus on the population is also driving the ISAF forces to push their presence from the big camps into smaller outposts closer to the people. That’s the first point Menard always emphasizes: “Live among the population and protect them day and night.” This carries some risk. Instead of arming to the teeth every time they go out, soldiers are more often leaving helmets and body armour aside as they participate in shuras with local district leaders and elders. But that builds trust and, sometimes, genuine co-operation.
Menard ran down a list of the other elements of his command philosophy. “Persistent, partnered presence.” No more of the “whack-a-mole” Canadian forces participated in for so long, where they would show up just long enough to beat down a sudden outcropping of insurgent violence, only to leave for another crisis zone and allow the Taliban to rebuild where they’d just been flushed out.
Instead, Menard has established two main geographic zones extending around Kandahar City. Closest to the hub is a “ring of stability,” in which ISAF forces and the Afghan government work together to ensure something like an ordinary life for a majority of the province’s population. “Creating an environment where people can be employed, sell their products, do their farming, have an alternative to what they know right now,” Menard said. Further out is a “ring of security,” in more sparsely populated terrain, where the coalition has been fighting the Taliban to a draw and where the bulk of the action this summer will take place.
The scale of the Canadians’ and Americans’ pure military advantage is breathtaking. In southern Panjwayi our convoy veered off-road and travelled through a patch of desert to meet 11 Canadian Leopard tanks encamped in a circle. Nothing the insurgents have can put more than a dent in any of those awesome machines. But not even hardware this impressive will provide the “enduring results” and the “persistent, partnered presence” that are on Menard’s checklist of proper counter-insurgency concepts.
