Send Someone Else — The NATO Assessment Filed Before Canada Won Its Biggest Battle Since Korea JJ

72 hours. That is how long Canadian soldiers had been holding the most contested piece of ground in southern Afghanistan before the NATO assessment arrived. 72 hours of sustained contact, temperatures at 43° C, ammunition running low, casualties mounting, and a Taliban force estimated at between 200 and 500 fighters pressing from three directions across a flat sunbaked plane with nowhere to hide and no line to fall back to. The assessment filed by a senior NATO planning officer at ESAF headquarters in Kandahar and

later cited in a 2007 Canadian Senate report on the mission read in part, “The situation at Poshm is untenable for current force composition recommendation, send someone else. Someone else.” The unit already there, already bleeding, already refusing to give an inch. 850 soldiers of the first battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group, and attached combat arms deployed into the Pango and Jari districts of Kandahar Province in the late summer of 2006.

They were not the largest force in Afghanistan. They were not the best equipped. They had no air cavalry, no dedicated armored cavalry regiment, and an artillery footprint that Natto planners had assessed as insufficient for the terrain. What they had was a doctrine. What they had was each other, and what they were about to do had not been done at that scale by the Canadian Army since the Battle of the Imjin River in 1951. Operation Medusa, September 2006. the largest offensive NATO combat operation since the

alliance’s founding in 1949 and Canada was going to fight it. To understand what happened in the Green Zone along the Arandab River in September 2006, you need to understand what had been happening for the preceding 18 months. The Taliban had not simply been hiding in the mountains. They had been doing something more dangerous than hiding. They had been preparing beginning in early 2005 with the International Security Assistance Force still largely confined to Kabul and the Americanled operation enduring freedom focused on

eastern Afghanistan and the Pakistani border. Taliban commanders in Queta Pakistan had recognized something that NATO planners had not yet fully accepted. The rural districts surrounding Kandahar city, the spiritual and symbolic capital of the Taliban movement were a strategic vacuum. The Panoi and Jari districts lie 25 km west of Kandahar city, a flat river valley, pomegranate orchards, dense grapeing huts with met thick mud walls, and a network of irrigation ditches 3 to 4 ft deep cut into hardpan that stopped

wheeled vehicles cold. The grape huts, locally called carz structures, were impenetrable to small arms fire, offered overhead protection from indirect fire, and were interconnected by covered trenches allowing movement between fighting positions without exposure. It was, in the assessment of Lieutenant General David Frasier, the ESOF commander for regional command south, quote, a deliberate structured defense in depth that any second world war staff officer would have recognized immediately. This

was not an insurgency. This was a conventional defensive line. By August 2006, between 500 and 2,000 Taliban fighters had occupied this defensive belt. They had mortars. They had recoilless rifles. They had eyed networks seated throughout the approach routes. They had a logistics chain running from Queta that kept them fed, armed, and reinforced. And they had a plan. The plan was to hold Pashol, the central village in their defensive position long enough to threaten Kandahar city itself.

A Taliban flag over Kandahar would not just be a tactical victory. It would be a strategic catastrophe for NATO’s entire southern mission. Into this problem, Canada had inherited command of regional command south in July 2006. Inherited is the operative word. The Americans who had previously held the sector handed over an intelligence picture that underestimated Taliban strength by a factor of three and left behind an operational plan that assumed a policeled counterinsurgency response to what was by then a near conventional

military threat. General Frasier needed a plan. What he had was 850 Canadians, 100 American soldiers, a company of Afghan National Army troops of uncertain reliability, and a deadline because if the Taliban were not broken at Pashm before autumn, they would winter in position, and by spring 2007, they would have Kandahar. The Canadian approach to what became Operation Medusa was on paper orthodox. In execution, it was improvised at a level that would have been alarming had anyone at NATO headquarters been

watching closely enough to notice. The plan had three phases. Phase one, fix the Taliban in position, prevent reinforcement from Pakistan, and conduct shaping operations to degrade their defensive network. Phase two, breach the defensive line with a direct assault through the most heavily fortified terrain in the district. Phase three, hold the ground, prevent reinfiltration, and transition to Afghan security forces. Phase 1 was executed with what was available. That meant 72 hours of sustained artillery fire from six5

me777 howitzers that represented Canada’s entire tube artillery commitment to the theater. supported by coalition aircraft operating under rules of engagement that required confirmation of hostile intent before each strike. In a complex terrain environment filled with civilian structures and Taliban fighters who moved freely between them, those rules of engagement would cost time and time in the Penuay green zone cost lives. Phase 2 began on 3 September 2006 at 06000 local time. Charles company, first

battalion Royal Canadian Regiment, crossed the line of departure with 120 soldiers and moved into the grape orchards. What happened next is one of the least discussed catastrophes in Canadian military history. Within 90 minutes, Charles company was pinned. The Taliban defensive positions had survived the shaping fires almost intact. The grape huts absorbed direct hits from 155 enma rounds and held the irrigation ditches channeled the Canadian advance into pre-sighted kill zones.

Within 4 hours, four Canadian soldiers were dead. More than 30 were wounded. The company’s Lav 3 infantry fighting vehicles, wheeled not tracked, struggled in the soft terrain near the river, and two became combat ineffective when they drove into irrigation channels not marked on Canadian maps because the maps had been drawn from satellite imagery taken in winter. Before the spring floods reshaped the ground, Charles Company’s commander, Major Matthew Jordan, reported the situation

to battle group headquarters. Quote, “From the Senate of Canada’s 2007 report on the campaign, we were taking fire from 270°. There was no direction that was safe. The volume was unlike anything we had trained for.” At this moment, the NATO assessment was filed. The recommendation to send someone else. The assessment was not wrong on the facts. Charles company was in a situation that required either a withdrawal, a massive reinforcement, or an act of institutional will that no planning document had anticipated.

Canada chose the third option. General Frasier committed his reserve. He requested and received additional close air support. He authorized the use of a B1B Lancer strike aircraft, dropping 2,000 lb JDAM munitions onto Taliban positions inside the defended area. An escalation that required ISO level approval and took 4 hours to authorize. 4 hours during which Canadian soldiers in ditches 80 m from active Taliban firing positions held position and did not break. Simultaneously, a company of Afghan National Army soldiers that NATO

planners had assessed as unreliable performed something approaching a military miracle. Trained and accompanied by Canadian operational mentor and liaison team advisers, the Anna Company conducted a flanking movement through terrain that the Taliban had assumed impassible. They emerged behind the eastern edge of the Taliban defensive line and forced a reorientation that opened a gap. Into that gap, Canada pushed everything it had left. The battle for the PML defensive line lasted from 3 September

to 17 September 2006. 14 days. Every one of those days produced casualties. Not every day produced clarity. On 4th September, the day after Charles Company’s near disaster, a second crisis emerged. A Canadian Lav 3 struck an ey whilst maneuvering through a cleared lane that had not, it turned out, been cleared. The vehicle was catastrophically destroyed. All eight soldiers inside were killed. It remains the single deadliest day for Canadian forces in Afghanistan. Eight men in one vehicle in 90 seconds

because a lane marked clear on a map drawn 3 days earlier had been receeded overnight by Taliban fighters who moved in the dark without thermal detection equipment and knew the ground the way a man knows his own kitchen. The names of the eight soldiers killed on 4th September 2006 are Warrant Officer Frank Melish, Private William Kushley, Sergeant Shane Stacknik, Private Josh Kluki, Warrant Officer Richard Nolan, Corporal Keith Moley, Private Mark Graham, and Corporal Glenn Arnold. They

are not footnotes. They are the reason that Operation Medusa must be understood in full rather than only in its outcome. 72 hours. that number from the beginning of this account. That is how long Charles company had been in sustained contact by the time the NATO assessment arrived. But consider this. By the time the battle ended on 17th September, Canadian and coalition forces had been in continuous operations for 15 days. operations conducted at temperatures exceeding 40° C in terrain that made vehicle resupply

intermittently impossible against a force that used civilians as cover and tunnels as highways. The breaking of the Taliban line at Poshmill did not come from a single decisive action. It came from accumulation, air strikes that degraded their logistics, artillery that made resupply from Pakistan predictable and deadly. and infantry, Canadian, American, Afghan that refused to allow the Taliban to rest, reset, or rotate. By 13th September, Taliban commanders were ordering tactical withdrawals from

positions they had held for a year. By 17th September, the last organized Taliban presence in the Pashmul complex had collapsed. The Taliban came to Penuay believing they would demonstrate that NATO could not dislodge them from prepared positions. They were wrong, but the cost of proving them wrong was higher than it should have been and lower than it could have been. Those two facts exist simultaneously and cannot be resolved. That was Brigadier General David Frasier speaking to the Canadian press in

October 2006, 3 weeks after the battle ended. He did not say we won. He said those two facts exist simultaneously. It is the most honest sentence spoken by a general officer about that engagement and it has been largely forgotten. Operation Medusa killed an estimated 512 Taliban fighters and wounded several hundred more. According to NATO’s own post-operation assessment, Canadian forces and coalition partners captured more than 100 prisoners, destroyed 11 tons of munitions cached in

the grape huts, and cleared 38 square kilometers of prepared Taliban defensive works. It was by any measurable standard a decisive tactical victory. The Taliban never again attempted to hold prepared conventional positions at that scale in Kandahar province. Operation Medusa changed their doctrine. They shifted permanently to the eyed campaign and the assassination network that would define the next 8 years of the conflict. That shift came at enormous cost to civilians, to ISAF forces, and to the

Afghan security services. But it came because Canada refused to let them win the battle they had designed to win. The cost. 12 Canadian soldiers killed during the operation along with one American, dozens wounded, many of whom sustained injuries that ended their careers. The psychological cost has never been formally tallied. But a 2010 Veterans Affairs Canada study found that soldiers who served in Kandahar province during the 2006 rotation reported post-traumatic stress disorder at rates 40% higher than the Canadian Forces

baseline for deployed personnel. Not 40% more likely, 40 percentage points higher. That is not a statistic to move past. Return now to the assessment filed before it all began. Send someone else. There was no someone else. Canada was the someone else. The force already there, already fixed in a defensive line it had not asked to defend, was the only force available that could execute what needed to be done. NATO’s largest combat operation since 1949 was planned by a Canadian general, led by Canadian

commanders, and shouldered by Canadian soldiers who were outnumbered, operating on incomplete maps without sufficient armor against a prepared enemy and ground the enemy had chosen. They did not win because they had more. They won because they did not stop. Consider what that assessment said about the institution that filed it. A headquarters that facing a crisis of this magnitude reached for administrative language untenable for current force composition because the alternative was to say what was actually

true. We do not know how to solve this and the people already there are going to have to solve it for us. That gap between what headquarters documents say and what frontline soldiers are required to do is not a Canadian problem. It is not a NATO problem. It is a permanent feature of how institutional organizations respond to events that fall outside their planning parameters. Operation Medusa fell outside every planning parameter. The force was wrong for the terrain. The maps were wrong for

the season. The rules of engagement were wrong for the enemy. The intelligence assessment of Taliban strength was wrong by a factor of three. And still 72 hours into the worst sustained contact Canadian soldiers had faced since Korea. With a NATO assessment on file recommending they be replaced, the soldiers of the Kandahar battle group did something that no planning document had anticipated and no assessment had mar they stayed. There is a version of military history that measures battles in kilometers

gained, casualty ratios, and objectives secured. Operation Medusa scores well by all three metrics. There is another version that asks what a battle required of the people who fought it and what it took from them that they did not volunteer to give. That version is harder to write, harder to read, and far more honest about what it means when a nation sends its soldiers somewhere dangerous and calls it policy. The NATO assessment that said send someone else was filed before the battle. After the battle, no one filed a

follow-up assessment correcting the record. No one wrote a document that said the force that was there was sufficient. They were always sufficient. We simply did not know how to measure what they were. That document was never written. It never is.