Louie Palu/CP
“This is the edge of the moon,” Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie told me as we dismounted from our armoured vehicles at the foot of the Soviet-built mountain fortress of Sperwan Ghar. He pointed westward. “If you go 100 m that way, you will die.”
For now, this little outpost, only 30 km from Kandahar City in the rolling farmland of the Panjwayi district, marks the outer edge of the territory Canadian troops control and patrol. It’s impenetrable: a steep man-made hill with heavy guns, a moat, and a tethered balloon whose cameras allow the 200-odd Canadian Forces soldiers there to monitor and sometimes target insurgent activity in every direction.
But to the west, Canadians have left the area to insurgent fighters. There are perhaps only a few hundred of them in a local population of 3,000, Maj. Wade Rutland told Leslie. But the bad guys have “complete freedom of manoeuvre” in and around three villages, Zangabad, Mushan and Talukan, that Rutland called the area’s “insurgent Axis of Evil.”
Leslie stared out at green vineyards punctuated by the telltale pink of opium poppies. “Well,” he said, “this summer a few thousand of our closest friends are going to be paying them a visit.”
Andrew Leslie is the chief of the land staff of the Canadian Forces. Every few months over the last four years, he has come back to Afghanistan to better understand the progress of Canada’s war effort. These are not royal visits: as quickly as he can, Leslie gets out of conference rooms and onto the road, travelling by light armoured vehicle to visit soldiers at the forward operating bases and combat outposts on the leading edge of battle. For this latest visit, his last before he is replaced as chief of the land staff in June, Leslie invited Maclean’s along for the ride.
This was my third trip to Kandahar, after short visits in late 2007 and late 2008. In those earlier visits I heard about the frustrating business-as-usual all Canadians have come to recognize in the news from Afghanistan. Hardy and valiant Canadian Forces troops were more than able to beat back periodic Taliban offensives against Kandahar City. But they were desperately insufficient in number for the task of holding the vast territory beyond. The Canadians put a brave face on, but at best, for year after brutal year, they were buying time. Until what? It was never clear.
This year is radically different. The old status quo is gone, wiped away by thousands of newly arrived U.S. troops, with more to come soon. That buildup began, here in the Afghan south, only last autumn. It has been breathtakingly rapid. Block after city block of newly built U.S. barracks line the boulevards of the sprawling International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base at Kandahar Air Field. In the forward bases Leslie was as likely to be briefed by a U.S. Army colonel or major as by a Canadian. In an unheralded departure from the tradition that U.S. soldiers take no orders from a foreigner, all of these forces, Canadian and American, are under the direction of a Canadian: Brig.-Gen. Daniel Menard, who arrived last November to serve as the commander of Joint Task Force Afghanistan.
It is hard to overstate the difference all of this new muscle makes to the strategic picture in Kandahar. A U.S. civilian official I met, viewing the landscape with the fresh eyes of a recent arrival, did perhaps the best job of summing up the new situation.
“The Canadians were out here for five years with a kind of augmented battalion. They call it a battle group but I think it only had about 1,200 guys in it,” said the U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “So the insurgents would come back every summer running the same play. If they were a football team, you would say they had one play in their playbook. The play is to lay up in the crescent around Kandahar City—from Arghandab to Zahri to Panjwayi to Dand, running north, west, south in that agricultural crescent,” he said, naming districts that are roughly equivalent in size to rural Canadian counties.
