In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

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In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan Page 26

by Seth G. Jones


  Epic Battles

  The years 2006 and 2007 witnessed some of the most intense battles since the Taliban was overthrown in 2001. Fighting became so fierce that British soldiers had to fix bayonets for hand-to-hand combat in Helmand Province against well-equipped Taliban militants. Beginning in January 2006, troops from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) started to replace U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan. The British 16th Air Assault Brigade, later reinforced by Royal Marines, formed the core of the force in southern Afghanistan, along with troops and helicopters from Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. The initial force consisted of roughly 3,300 British soldiers, 2,500 Canadians, 1,963 Dutch, and forces from Denmark, Australia, and Estonia. Air support was provided by U.S., British, Dutch, Norwegian, and French combat aircraft and helicopters.

  The British recognized the Taliban threat. “We underestimate, at our peril the resilience of the Taliban and its capacity to regenerate,” a British assessment acknowledged. “The Taliban gain influence and control of the population through coercion, intimidation, and their extensive tribal ties across Helmand.”34

  In early February 2006, Afghan forces, backed by U.S. warplanes, engaged in intense fighting in the Sangin district of Helmand Province. The battle began the evening of February 2, when approximately 200 Taliban fighters targeted an Afghan police convoy. American A-10 ground-attack aircraft and B-52 bombers and British Harrier jets supported Afghan ground forces over two days of fighting, which resulted in about twenty Taliban deaths and seven Afghan police and soldiers killed. On February 13, four U.S. soldiers were killed when their Humvee was hit by a remote-controlled bomb while they were patrolling with Afghan National Army forces in the southern province of Oruzgan. The patrol then came under attack from small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, forcing it to call in U.S. Apache helicopter and B-52 bomber support. On March 1, one U.S. soldier was killed and two were wounded in a clash with Taliban insurgents in Oruzgan, after a roadside bomb destroyed a U.S. vehicle and U.S. forces engaged the insurgents. A week later, another roadside bomb killed four U.S. soldiers in eastern Afghanistan.

  In response to Taliban penetration of the east, U.S. and ANA forces launched Operation Mountain Lion on March 25, 2006, in Kunar Province, east of Kabul.35 On June 15, 2006, more than 11,000 U.S., British, Canadian, and Afghan troops engaged insurgents in southern Oruzgan and northern Helmand Provinces during Operation Mountain Thrust. The mission was designed to eradicate Taliban penetration in these provinces and establish a secure environment in which reconstruction could begin. Prior to the operations, these provinces had seen little military presence. During June and July, there was heavy fighting between NATO and Taliban forces, with the Taliban exhibiting a high degree of coordination in their combat operations. Despite the reported killing of more than 1,000 Taliban insurgents and the capture of almost 400 more, the Taliban continued to exert a presence in these areas. In early August, the Taliban mounted a number of ambushes against NATO forces.

  As in many other operations, the insurgent response to Operation Mountain Thrust was to flee from the area and prepare to fight another day.36 This classic guerrilla tactic—especially against a more capable conventional adversary—was regularly used by mujahideen fighters during the Soviet War.

  By the summer of 2006, the Taliban began to concentrate their efforts on southern Afghanistan—including Kandahar Province—in what would become one of the largest and most important battles of the war. “Truthfully, I was surprised by the resistance they put up,” said Canadian Major Geoff Abthorpe, commander of Bravo Company. “We came at them with what I perceived to be a pretty heavy fist.”37 The southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand represented the Taliban center of gravity. Since several key Taliban leaders came from Kandahar, they had one of their greatest support networks there. The Canadian military, which had just deployed to Kandahar, had not engaged in serious ground combat since the Korean War; their focus had been on peacekeeping operations in the Balkans and other locations. But they were eager to fight.

  “I know about all this cultural sensitivity stuff,” said Canadian Sergeant John May. “But I am here to fight. If those [Taliban] are going to set ambushes and IEDs, I am going to kill them. That’s my job.”38

  Operation Medusa

  The Taliban had developed an important sanctuary in Panjwai and Zhare districts, located west of Kandahar City. The mujahideen had scored important victories there over the ill-fated Soviet 40th Army in the 1980s. Grapes and other fruit grew there, and the fields, vineyards, compounds, and ditches that dotted the landscape offered ideal defensive terrain for the Taliban, with a self-sustaining food supply.39

  The city of Kandahar was the urban hub for Operation Medusa. The terrain was marked by Highway 1, which ran northeast to Kabul and northwest to Herat, and Highway 4, which ran south to Quetta, Pakistan. Kandahar Airfield, the headquarters of NATO operations in southern Afghanistan and a former Soviet air base, sat along Highway 4 to the south of the city. Panjwai and Zhare districts lay to the west, and the Arghandab River sliced through the area. The bulk of the activity during Operation Medusa took place in what became known as the “Pashmul pocket,” situated next to the town of Pashmul.

  In July 2006, Canada’s Task Force Orion, with roughly 1,200 soldiers, saw a sharp increase of Taliban activity in Panjwai district. The local Taliban, who had long relied on small-unit attacks and ambushes throughout the area, were starting to control ground. The Taliban had allied themselves with local Nurzai tribes in Kandahar.40 On August 3, four soldiers were killed and ten were wounded near Pashmul in close fighting. Mao Zedong once wrote that insurgencies can be divided into three stages: (1) political preparation, (2) limited attacks, and (3) conventional war, typified by insurgents beginning to control territory and massing in large numbers. Lieutenant Colonel Omer Lavoie, commander of the Task Force 3–06 Battle Group, told his planning staff that this was “classic stage three of an insurgency.”

  “Basically, they want us to become decisively engaged,” he said. No one, least of all the Canadians, had expected the Taliban to conduct conventional operations. Since 2002, the Taliban had used asymmetric tactics, such as ambushes and roadside bombs, to target NATO and Afghan forces. “I have to admit that this is not where I expected to be,” Lavoie explained. “For the last six months I trained my battle group to fight a counterinsurgency, and now find that we are facing something a lot more like conventional warfare.”41

  Over the last two weeks of August, Taliban forces became increasingly aggressive. They ambushed several convoys and regularly mortared Patrol Base Wilson, about twenty-five miles west of Kandahar City. They appeared to be looking for a fight, hoping to draw Canadian forces into a pitched battle. One of their most provocative moves was to take control of Highway I in Kandahar, setting up checkpoints and threatening the city. A legitimate government does not permit an insurgent group to administer a major roadway. The Canadian Expeditionary Force Command asserted: “The securing of these routes…was a vital phase in [Operation] MEDUSA.”42 NATO intelligence reports indicated that hundreds of Afghan civilians were fleeing Kandahar on a daily basis in fear of the Taliban.43

  In an effort to roust the Taliban from one of their most important sanctuaries, the Canadian planning staff designed an effort to clear the eastern pocket of Panjwai district. The battle group they commanded consisted of three infantry companies, an artillery battery, a squadron of engineers, and an armored reconnaissance troop. Aerial reconnaissance assets monitored enemy movement when they moved in the open. By late August, a combined force of soldiers from the Canadian Task Force 3–06 Battle Group, Afghan National Army, United States, Dutch, and eventually Danish forces waited for H-hour—when the operation was set to begin. The Canadian brigade staff issued a warning to all noncombatants who lived in Panjwai to leave immediately. This left Taliban alone in the area, waiting for the fight they had surely been expecting.44

  Air operations commenced on Sept
ember 2, 2006, while ground forces positioned themselves in a pincer formation north and south of the district. Canadian artillery, made up of Echo Battery, 2nd Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, fired hundreds of 155-millimeter rounds into the area of operations. Apache helicopters from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom fired rockets and 30-millimeter cannons. Harrier jets from Britain’s Royal Air Force and F-16 Falcons from the Royal Netherlands Air Force dropped 500-pound bombs, and B-1B Lancer bombers from the U.S. Air Force dropped precision-guided munitions. As the attack unfolded, Canada’s Charles Company, under the command of Major Matthew Sprague, positioned itself at Ma’sum Ghar, across the Arghandab River from Pashmul. They established a firing line looking northwest toward the “white schoolhouse,” a known Taliban strongpoint.45 Bravo Company, under the command of Major Geoff Abthorpe, provided a screen in the north along Highway 1.

  On September 3, Charles Company was ordered to cross the Arghandab River and move into Pashmul. Enemy resistance was stiff. The Taliban set up an ambush and destroyed several Canadian vehicles, killed four Canadian soldiers, and wounded nine in intense fighting. Explosions echoed across grape and pomegranate fields, and clouds of dust rose amid the greenery and mud houses. The Taliban used layered defensive positions with trenches and fought with recoilless rifles, mortars, RPG-7s, and machine guns.46 Under supporting fire from artillery and with close air support directed by forward air controllers, Charles Company made a tactical retreat back to the original Ma’sum Ghar firing line. They left behind three damaged vehicles: a bulldozer, a Mercedes Benz G-Wagon, and a LAV III in the vicinity of the white schoolhouse.47 The LAV III is an 8x8 wheeled vehicle that carries a 25-millimeter cannon and can reach top speeds of more than sixty miles per hour. It is vastly more rugged than the G-Wagon, a four-wheel sport utility vehicle also used in the field. Neither was a great loss, but the troops were unnerved by their retreat. On the same day, a British Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft had crashed, killing all on board. Despite these losses, aerial bombardment and artillery fire continued, along with fire from LAV IIIs and Coyote reconnaissance vehicles.

  On September 4, close air support sorties engaged Taliban targets in the Pashmul pocket, including the white schoolhouse, which was leveled by a 500-pound bomb. That same day, Charles Company suffered another setback as a U.S. A-10 Thunderbolt mistakenly targeted Canadian forces, strafing the position of Charles Company with 30-millmeter high-explosive incendiary rounds. The attack killed Private Mark Graham, a member of Canada’s 4x400-meter relay team at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. “He was such a strong and sweet man,” his fiancé wrote in a statement after his death. “He had strong morals, values, ethics and they showed in everything he did.”48 In addition, thirty Canadians were wounded that day, including several senior noncommissioned officers and the company commander, Major Sprague. A Board of Inquiry report convened by Canadian Expeditionary Force Command found that the U.S. pilot had lost his situational awareness. He mistook a garbage fire at the Canadian location for his target, without verifying the target through his targeting pod and heads-up display. The forward air controller reacted immediately to the friendly-fire incident, screaming, “Abort! Abort! Abort!” on his radio.49

  “I had been off to the side and heard the A-10 sound. I hit the ground, and when I got up I saw all the [injured] laying there,” said Corporal Jason Plumley.50 An aerial medevac team rapidly arrived. In less than thirty-six hours, Charles Company had lost much of its leadership at the officer and noncommissioned-officer level. All four of its warrant officers had been either killed or wounded. Captain Steve Brown was suddenly in charge of a company that had a corporal acting as company quartermaster and a sergeant as company sergeant major. There was a lull in ground operations after the friendly-fire incident, and the north, along Highway 1, then became the main theater of operation.51

  So-called friendly fire is an unfortunate reality on the battlefield. Two years earlier, U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman had been accidentally killed by his own platoon members in eastern Afghanistan. A long-haired, hard-hitting safety with the Arizona Cardinals in the National Football League, he held the franchise record of 224 tackles. Tillman turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract in the spring of 2002 to join the U.S. Army with his brother, Kevin. As he remarked the day after the September 11 attacks: “At times like this you stop and think about just how good we have it, what kind of system we live in, and the freedoms we are allowed. A lot of my family has gone and fought in wars and I really haven’t done a damn thing.”52

  But the circumstances of his death were contentious. Initial reports stated that Tillman was killed by hostile fire, but a month later the Pentagon notified the Tillman family that he had died because of friendly fire. The family alleged that the Department of Defense delayed the disclosure out of a desire to protect the image of the U.S. military, and a subsequent Pentagon investigation concluded: “Corporal Tillman’s chain of command made critical errors in reporting Corporal Tillman’s death,” and “Army officials failed to properly update family members when an investigation was initiated into Corporal Tillman’s death.”53 A similar congressional report found “serious flaws” in the Pentagon’s investigation and suggested that “the combination of a difficult battle in Fallujah, bad news about the state of the war, and emerging reports about Abu Ghraib prison” may have created a motive to obfuscate the details of Tillman’s death.54

  With Canadian forces still reeling from the friendly-fire incident, five members of Bravo Company were injured on September 5, 2006, when they were hit by mortar fire in the Pashmul pocket while they were resupplying their armored vehicles. The Taliban had almost certainly been monitoring Canadian movements, and waited for an opportune time to strike. As forces were redeployed to the north, reconnaissance patrols were sent out almost daily. Intelligence reports noted that the artillery fire and air support, which had been unceasing since operations began, were taking a toll.55 The Taliban found it difficult to resupply and maintain control. On September 6, Bravo Company breached the treeline that divided Canadian from Taliban territory. With the forward position established, they began a systematic move southward. They engaged in firefights, seized and cleared territory, and then waited for the next forward passage of lines. Troops from the Canadian Battle Group, a U.S. company drawn from the 10th Mountain Division, and Afghan National Army troops methodically cleared the compounds, houses, and fields of enemy forces.56

  By September 10, Canadian, Afghan, and other NATO forces had advanced deep into Taliban territory. Air support from U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets joined the attack from the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in the Indian Ocean. Engineers blew holes in the walls of buildings allowing soldiers to enter, and bulldozers opened routes through fields and vineyards.

  “I thought I had some idea of what I was going to be going through,” said Canadian Corporal Jason Legros. “I figured I would be shot at a few times but I didn’t expect to be ambushed.”57

  Follow-On Operations

  On September 13, Coalition forces had reached the Arghandab River. By September 17, NATO forces had cleared most of Panjwai. Estimates of insurgent dead were well into the hundreds, and hundreds more had attempted to flee to Helmand Province or to other pockets of Kandahar Province.58 NATO forces in Kandahar followed Operation Medusa with reconstruction and development efforts. They provided emergency water, food, shelter, health care, and animal feed to local Afghans in the area of operations, and they assisted the return of locals who had fled.59

  But there were complaints from local villagers and human-rights organizations that civilians had been unnecessarily impacted. As Human Rights Watch wrote in a letter to NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, “during Operation Medusa, NATO troops killed large numbers of livestock and destroyed numerous vineyards that insurgents were using as cover…causing much economic damage to civilians and fostering resentment towards NATO troops.”60 Human Rights Watch pointed out that NATO lacked a compensation program fo
r Afghan families who suffered losses because of NATO operations, and the organization strongly urged a change in policy.

  In tandem with Operation Medusa, approximately 4,000 Afghan and 3,000 U.S. troops initiated Operation Mountain Fury in September 2006 to defeat Taliban resistance in Paktika, Khowst, Ghazni, Paktia, and Lowgar Provinces in east-central Afghanistan. Fighting continued throughout that autumn and into December. During the early morning hours of December 15, NATO aircraft attacked a Taliban command post in Kandahar. The same day, aircraft began dropping three sets of leaflets over the region. The first warned the population of the impending conflict, the next was a plea for locals to turn their backs on the Taliban and support NATO, and the third consisted of an image of a Taliban fighter with a large “X” through it to warn Taliban to leave the area. During the days prior to the operation, Canadian soldiers held several meetings with tribal elders to discuss reconstruction efforts and persuade them to keep the Taliban out of the area. While en route to one of these meetings, a Canadian soldier from the Royal 22e Régiment—the “Vandoos,” out of Quebec—stepped on a land mine. The soldier, Private Frederic Couture, suffered severe but non-life-threatening injuries and was transported to a military hospital.61

  On December 19, limited offensive operations began against Taliban forces. A massive barrage of Canadian artillery and tank fire rained down on their positions. The barrage lasted for forty-five minutes and was supported by heavy machine-gun fire from Canadian .50-caliber guns. Shortly after the barrage ended, Canadian armored convoys set up a perimeter around the village of Howz-e Madad. Over the next few days, NATO forces secured several towns with little resistance from Taliban fighters. Near Howz-e Madad, a ten-square-kilometer area with mud-walled fortresses provided refuge to a larger group of Taliban fighters. NATO forces gave the surrounded fighters two days to surrender. After the forty-eight hours, the Taliban fired on the Canadian forces. Two rockets flew past Charles Company just south of Howz-e Madad. The Afghan National Army responded with a burst of machine-gun fire, but no one on either side took casualties. On January 5, a forty-five-minute firefight erupted between about twenty members of the Royal 22e Régiment and a force of Taliban fighters about half that size near the village of Lacookhal, just south of Howz-e Madad, where the soldiers from the Royal 22e Régiment had been looking for arms caches and Taliban. The Taliban used automatic rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. By the time the firefight ceased, at least two of the Taliban fighters had been killed. There were no Canadian or Afghan National Army casualties.

 

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