Read No Lack of Courage Online
Authors: Colonel Bernd Horn
No Lack of Courage (6 page)
It was the Taliban's excellent use of fieldcraft that removed some of the vulnerability they imposed on themselves by engaging in a conventional attritional battle. Trench lines were prepared by hand and superbly concealed to evade detection by ground and airborne ISR assets. Trenches were tied into thick mud walls that proved extremely resilient against both direct fire weapons (i.e., 25mm cannon and small arms) and C4 explosives. In fact, they had developed a sophisticated strongpoint replete with entrenchments that resembled a Soviet defensive position. Communications trenches were dug to connect the larger trench system and bunkers. Lieutenant-Colonel Schreiber concluded, “[the Taliban] had a battalion defensive position fully dug-in with complex robust command and control capability with mutually supporting positions and advanced surveillance and early warning.”
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The Taliban was highly motivated and fought in place. Their fire discipline was strictly imposed in order to draw coalition forces into their kill zones and they aggressively launched counterattacks from the flanks with small mobile teams to attack the depth of assaulting forces. Finally, an army report also noted that their gunnery, “particularly with the SPG [73mm / 82mm recoilless rifle] was very good resulting in the defeat of a LAV 3 and support vehicles during one assault.”
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Undeniably, the Taliban had chosen their ground well. Beyond the fortifications they had built, the natural lay of the land worked in their favour. Pashmul is a greenbelt with thick vegetation. Seven-foot-high marijuana fields hid movement and masked the thermal imagery of the LAV.
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As one official report noted:
The terrain was extremely difficult due to the combination of natural and built up features. Enemy defences were anchored on the Arghandab River that provided a natural impediment to high-speed manoeuvre to the defensive position. Although dried up for the most part, the steepness of the banks canalized movement to fording sites where we were vulnerable to enemy direct and indirect fires. Canals criss-crossed the manoeuvre space and proved an impediment to off-road movement for LAVs. Corn and marijuana fields (with stalks extending to a height of 6â8 feet) limited visibility and provided excellent concealment for both TB [Taliban] fighters and natural obstacles. The most significant terrain features were arguably the mud walls and the vineyards. Mud walls approximately eight feet high and two feet thick dominated the terrain. In one case 10 blocks of C4 were required for a single breach. The vineyards covered earth mounds approximately 3â5 feet high with rows arranged every three feet.
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Captain Chris Purdy echoed the assessment of the enemy's careful choice of ground. “The enemy actually had a fairly high level of command
and control,” he emphasized, “and it became obvious to see how they would manoeuvre around the area.” He believed the Taliban objective would be “to suck us right into the heart of Pashmul where we could be engaged dismounted . . . The enemy was very afraid of the LAVs. They called them tanks, the green monsters, a number of terms, but they were quite aware that the LAV is a hard thing to engage.” Purdy appraised, “They had two aims: one was to suck us into a dismounted battle where they could effectively kill a large number of our soldiers, and also to suck the LAVs into an area where they can be engaged with mortars and the 82 mm recoilless rifles.”
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Clearly, the imposing challenges of both the natural terrain and the tenacity and preparation of the enemy required careful preparation. Brigadier-General Fraser explained, “A lot of effort was devoted in Phase 2 to building up, assembling the enablers and forces we required, as well as the logistical support . . . In addition, we attempted to lure the Taliban out so we could determine their exact size, location and engage them.” His intent was not to launch Phase 2, the actual ground attack, until “we decided we were ready and the Taliban were severely weakened.”
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Having determined the Taliban's intent, Fraser was determined to control the conduct and tempo of the battle. He explained:
So I made an assessment and I thought, “Okay, they've gone conventional, this is their intent, so how do we defeat their intent.” Well, I decided that we will defeat their intent by putting our forces all around them and we will wait them out. You see, they wanted us to get into a battle of attrition, to slug it out, to try and clear them out of that complex terrain where they have all the advantageous of a well dug-in and protected forceâwhere our technological superiority could be nullified. I directed that we would wait them out. I reversed the roles on them. The Taliban went conventional and ISAF went unconventional. I decided that we would manoeuvre, feint and slap a cordon around them. We would engage them in a battle of attrition, but it would be on our terms, namely a battle of attrition through joint fires.
We anticipated that the enemy had two courses of action. One was that they would just continue to move around and we would continue to attack them. The second enemy course of action, the most dangerous, was if they attacked. This is what they didâthey continually challenged us on the fringes of the terrain that held and fortified. Nonetheless, I wanted to wait for two to three weeks, all the while hammering them with fires and then eventually when I thought the time was right, when the enemy was physically and psychologically weak, then go in and seize the objective areas we had identified in the Pashmul area.
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Fraser deployed his forces around the objective area to provide as much containment as he could. The containment force maintained a dynamic disposition in order to provoke the enemy to move inside the “circle so we could shape the battle and advantageously engage the enemy.”
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Coalition forces also dropped psychological pamphlets to warn and encourage non-combatants/civilians and less fanatical enemy personnel to vacate the area. “For the three weeks before we launched Operation Medusa, we talked to and gave money to every village leader in the area,” revealed Fraser. “In exchange, we asked them to get rid of the Taliban.” He conceded, “We had limited success.”
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Brigadier-General Fraser briefed General Richards on the plan for Operation Medusa. In turn, the ISAF Commander confirmed to Fraser that Operation Medusa was the ISAF main effort. In fact, he went even further and pronounced that Operation Medusa was actually the “NATO main effort.”
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That sentiment was supported by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who publically announced, “If we fail and this nation becomes a failed state again, the consequences will be felt in Ottawa, in Brussels, in the Hague, in Madrid, in New York and elsewhere. That is what is at stake.”
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Scheffer's pronouncement of risk and his perceived importance of the operation were of little help. Coalition forces were spread very thinly around the cordon. Despite the rhetoric being espoused at the highest
levels of NATO regarding the importance of the looming battle, the action would be a largely Canadian fight. “Promises of
in extremis
assistance were a placebo to take the sting away from the constant âno' that always came following requests to send troops to the south, and meant nothing,” stated General Hillier. “We were,” he angrily recalled, “essentially in it by ourselves.”
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The Americans and British were already engaged in combat elsewhere in Afghanistan and were hard-pressed to assist, although they did what they could. The Europeans failed their allies and refused to participate. The Dutch declined to assist in the actual combat but did take over FOB Martello, which freed up additional Canadian resources that were fed into the battle.
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But the problems did not stop with the shortage of combat troops. Brigadier-General Fraser lamented, “There are a lot of challenges working within any coalition [e.g., national agendas, different SOPs, TTPs, languages, staff procedures], however, the biggest challenge in Afghanistan is that you very quickly learn that NATO in itself has virtually none, or very little, of the necessary combat enablers.” He continued:
For instance, I briefed the commander of ISAF personally on the context of my operations for Operation Medusa. He [Richards] in turn confirmed to me that I was ISAF's, no actually he said NATO's, main effort. As a result, one would think okay, it seems like the commander supports everything so I should be given the support I need. However, that isn't necessarily the case because NATO doesn't own the enablers. The enablers for the most part are still owned by their contributing countries and here in Afghanistan, largely the enablers that we're looking at are aviation, air and ISR and they are still American or British, and to some degree in this theatre Dutch. So, even though he says you are the main effort, you still have to convince those countries that you are the main effort. And if they are reluctant, NATO doesn't even necessarily have the hammer to direct, for sake of example, the British to provide this and the
Americans to provide that. So that was the first real big thing I noticed. As a result, there was a lot of begging. I know that the Multi National Brigade and even the Commander of ISAF had to go and do a lot of groveling to and bartering to get the required assets shifted over to our operation. And the effect it had on me though was that the enablers that did become available had restrictions on them. For instance I was told, okay you can have these things for x-amount of days, but then they're being shifted back to whatever region again.
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In the end, Brigadier-General Fraser bemoaned, “The national caveats in NATO are killing me, they are really killing me.” He noted, “We found out what NATO could not do. We simply couldn't get everyone we needed . . . The Germans wouldn't come down here; the French company weren't allowed to come down here; and I couldn't get the Italians . . . We did get the Portuguese to come into the Kandahar Airfield to help out with static security tasks but most NATO countries came out with national caveats that precluded them from assisting us in actually fighting in Pashmul.”
As one senior Canadian officer later described of Operation Medusa, “We were basically told you're on your fucking own for a while.”
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The lack of allied participation was not only frustrating, it was also shocking considering what was at stake. As Fraser elaborated:
The idea of failing here [i.e., not defeating the Taliban in Pashmul] was unacceptable. You want to talk about pressure, this was about a city [Kandahar City], a country, an alliance, and Canada was right in the middle of it, both from a battle group and from a brigade point of view. The battle was everything and failure was not an option. This was not just an attack; it was not just an operational fight; it was a NATO fight, it was everything and the more that we got into this fight, the more the pink cardsâthe un-stated national caveats started to
creep into it. The more we got into the fight, the more we found that this was exactly what NATO was built for. This was almost Cold War-like type of fighting. It was conventional fighting.
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Fraser was not alone in his assessment. The CDS explained, “All of the sudden in 2006, we found ourselves in the middle of a war . . . we found ourselves up against a determined and tough enemy.” General Hillier noted that “the Taliban were massing against Canadian and other NATO forces, trying to take over Kandahar City and discredit NATO, discredit Canada and probably cause the fall of the Afghan government itself.”
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But not everyone was prepared to participate. As Fraser began to line up his formation to do battle he realized he was starkly alone. He had a plan, but not the forces necessary to execute it. He would need to adapt and quickly because the main fight was approaching faster than he or anyone else wished. And no one had any false expectations. As Lieutenant-Colonel Schreiber bluntly acknowledged, “We knew we had a real hard nut to crack.”
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Courtesy 1 RCR BG.
LAV IIIs operating in the lush Pashmul district. The 17-ton, eight-wheeled armoured vehicle proved to be a robust, reliable workhorse that won the affection and trust of the troops.
