Read No Lack of Courage Online
Authors: Colonel Bernd Horn
Ominously, the SOF linguist attached to the BG to monitor radio intercepts for the operation confirmed “the Taliban were confident they could hold the ground.” Based on the amount of enemy radio chatter, he assessed “there had to be 900 to 1,200 insurgents in the area.”
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As the situation transformed from desperate to precarious even the seriously wounded manned their weapons to hold back the advancing Taliban. Hope received a desperate call for assistance from one of his subordinate officers. The message was simple and directâthe officer informed his CO that “if they did not get LAVs up there now, they would all die.”
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Lieutenant-Colonel Hope pushed fresh troops forward. All braved the fire to assist their comrades. At the same time, in nearby Kandahar City, a suicide bomber attacked Hope's recovery convoy, on its way to provide assistance and pull the damaged LAVs off the battlefield. Hope realized “that we were enveloped, and that the enemy were coordinating their efforts to trap and annihilate us.”
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The CO once again realized how “everything in Afghanistan submits to incredible friction.”
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The situation was tenuous at best and the commanding officer needed to regain the initiative so that he could withdraw his forces. Hope later recounted, “It is as if in the middle of a lonely fight for life, the hand of a true angel descended to give us decisive help.”
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During the frenetic struggle to hold the Taliban at bay an American B-1 Bomber that had already dropped their ordnance elsewhere, but heard Hope's desperate calls for assistance, passed dangerously low at less than 500 feet over the insurgents' positions and lit their afterburners, creating an explosion that reverberated through the battlefield, providing an enormous boost to the Canadians and cowing the Taliban. That air support, and the assistance of French Mirage fighter jets, turned the tide and returned the initiative to the Canadians. However, with light fading and the absence of any ANSF troops to hold the ground once taken, Hope decided to pull back. He also realized that the Taliban had returned in strength and it had now become a larger operation, beyond his unit, to dislodge them.
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The concept of Operation Medusa was born in the heat, death, and destruction of the 3 August battle.
“The cost [of the 3 August battle] was significant,” conceded Fraser. But he insisted, “We picked it . . . we, being the Afghan government, picked the fight. They had information that there was Taliban there so we picked the conditions and went in after them.”
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The brigade commander explained how they had been in Panjwayi a couple of times before with TF Orion and “we knew it was an important area for the Taliban . . . However, we didn't have enough forces to go in there earlier for a sustained offensive effort, other than what we conducted with Lieutenant-Colonel Hope's battle group.”
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He acknowledged what most had come to suspect. He indicated the “scale of Taliban activity made it clear we would have to come back.” In fact, he described:
It was 3 August when we went in there and lost a couple of guys. We received intelligence of major activity, that's why Hope was going back in there. We knew it was big and Lieutenant-Colonel Hope went in and got hit hard in the objective area. We met after that and analysed what happened. The Taliban used two improvised
explosive device (IED) attacks roughly in the centre of the objective area, as well as RPGs. Our assessment was that the Taliban had gone into the Pashmul area, specifically the Bazar-e-Panjwayi area, dug in, and now he was prepared to fight. Quite frankly, the Taliban was everything we thought and more. In fact, he was more sophisticated at what he was doing than we originally thought. So we analysed all that, figured out where he was and what he was doing and came to the assessment that he was acting as a conventional force. We then asked ourselves one question: what was the enemy's intent?
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Brigadier-General Fraser pondered the problem. Fraser believed Panjwayi was going to be the Taliban's “major fight for the summer.” He explained, “the third of August was the defining day that we knew exactly what we were facing, and what the enemy wanted to do, the enemy's intent.”
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In Fraser's estimation, the enemy's intent “was to isolate Kandahar City, not directly but indirectly, to demonstrate the weakness and the inability of the national Government to come after them with a conventional force.”
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He stated, “This also indicated to us that the Taliban were actually progressing with the evolution of their own operations to the next stage
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where they thought they were capable enough to go and challenge the national government and coalition forces in a conventional manner.”
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Fraser added, “We also assessed that their intent was to engage the international community in a battle of attrition on ground of their tactical choosing to cause as many casualties as they could to attack our centre of gravity (i.e., domestic public support).”
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He concluded that the Taliban plan “was designed to defeat us from a âpolitical will' point of view; to illustrate weakness in the Government of Afghanistan and thereby set the stage where the Taliban could attack the city and defeat not only the provincial government there but also attack the national government in Afghanistan in a fairly sophisticated and substantive way.”
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As a result, Fraser briefed his plan to Lieutenant-General David Richards, the British commander then in charge of NATO's forces in Afghanistan at NATO headquarters. “I said this is a fight we can't lose,” remembered Fraser. “This is the main, main fight.”
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With the Canadian BG bloodied and bruised from its latest incursion into Pashmul, it became clear to commanders and staffs that the problem was now larger than most had anticipated. It was a brigade operation. As Brigadier-General Fraser had counselled his superiors, it was now “the main, main fight.”
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The enemy had proven to be tenacious and skilled; they had decided to dig-in and fight. Ominously, they were massing for a potential strike at Kandahar City itself, which would prove politically crippling, if not fatal, to the Government of Afghanistan and the coalition. Fraser and his staff knew they had to develop an effective plan.
ISAF headquarters assigned the Multinational Brigade (MNB) the mission of defeating the Taliban in Pashmul in order to set the conditions for the establishment of the Kandahar Afghan Development Zone (ADZ).
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Fraser realized as a commander he had to answer three critical questions: What is it I am facing? What if something happens? What must I do next? He felt that answering those three basic questions would assist with his phasing of the operation. It also helped him “deal with an asymmetric enemy.”
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Subsequently, Fraser issued his intent, which was: to disrupt the Taliban in the district; achieve security for the local population and freedom of manoeuvre for aid agencies; complete Quick Impact Projects (QIPs) to achieve rapid reconstruction; and subsequently develop the region's governance and economic capacity. He developed a scheme of manoeuvre that involved four phases:
1. shape the battlefield to disrupt Taliban forces through the conduct of leadership engagements, brigade manoeuvres, and the intensive application of air and indirect fires (e.g., fighter aircraft, Spectre C-130 gunships, artillery);
2. conduct operations (i.e., decisive strike, link-up, and secure the area of operations [AO]) to clear enemy out of Pashmul/Panjwayi;
3. exploit success to the west of Panjwayi to create a secure zone for the ADZ; and
4. conduct stabilization operations and reconstruction to support the return and security of the population in the region.
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Retrospectively, Fraser acknowledged that “in Phase 1, we spent a lot of time planning and gathering intelligence.”
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Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Williams, the joint effects coordination officer, recalled, “The threat was generally a very conventional one so we devoted a lot of time toward developing target packs.”
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In essence, the idea was to get “a very clear picture of what was in there,” according to Captain Chris Purdy, the TF 3-06 intelligence officer. He explained:
We then wanted to conduct a feint in order to get the Taliban to light up their C2 nodes, to get the Taliban to reinforce so we could see them moving into their forward positions. And then when they did that we would strike them. And the feint, the way we conceived to do the feint, to get the same reaction that we did on the last two times we went in there [i.e., TF Orion] was to use the same scheme of manoeuvre, essentially a company from the north, and a company from the south, the same methodology that Ian Hope had used and we hoped to get the same reaction. We had a lot of fire power. So we thought we were going to be successful in doing that. [The theory was] once we had done that and we'd essentially reduced the Taliban defense in there[i.e., Pashmul/Panjwayi] to small isolated pockets, we would
then conduct a link-up of the companies moving north to south and south to north respectively and clear the remaining pockets out.
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The plan lacked one major componentâcombat forces. The MNB operations officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Shane Schreiber, acknowledged, “We were spread pretty thin on the ground between Martello, Spin Boldak, Kandahar City and Panjwayi. Therefore, we wanted to do was concentrate that BG and essentially fix the Taliban in Pashmul to make sure that they couldn't push any further into Kandahar or Highway 1.” He described how that they had hoped to use the coalition's superior ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) assets and firepower to “begin to pull apart the nodes and take apart the Taliban defense.” But Schreiber conceded, “We didn't have enough [combat power] to clear it . . . At that point we assessed it would have taken a brigade attack and there was no way we were ever going to generate a four, or even a three BG brigade to be able to do that.” Schreiber quickly added, “Nor did we want to because of the collateral damage that would have caused. So instead, what we decided to do was to defeat the Taliban build-up by isolating and disrupting and pulling the Taliban apart in chunks, hoping that at some point they would say âokay it's not worth it.'”
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Schreiber was referring to the hired guns, the day fightersâthose who fought for the Taliban for money and were not necessarily committed to the cause. The coalition hoped that those fighters would drift away leaving only the “level one” or hard-core Taliban, who would then concentrate in smaller numbers, allowing the coalition to destroy them.
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Brigadier-General Fraser believed this was the core of the plan. “Initially, we thought there was 500 enemy in the âpocket'â200 hard core, 300 tier two [i.e., local hired guns versus ideological fanatics] and my intent for Phase 2 was to engage the Taliban forces over a prolonged period of time with lethal fires (e.g., fast air, artillery) . . . That would entice the less dedicated, you know, the tier two types, to give up the fight.” Fraser stressed, “I wanted to impact those individuals who had joined up to go in for a couple of days, you know, get paid a few bucks, have a few wins [i.e., successful attacks/inflict casualties on coalition forces] and then leave. I was
going to draw out the fight with long-range fires as long as I could and go after their minds, realizing that it would then be harder for their commanders to keep them [tier 2 fighters] motivated and keep them going . . . So this was all about time, patience, perseverance, and not rushing into it. We had no intention of rushing into it.”
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In essence, Fraser's intent was to separate the Taliban forces by putting deliberate kinetic and non-kinetic pressure on them. “We had them contained. They were fixing themselves, or rather they had fixed themselves.” Fraser explained, “They were bringing forces in from everywhereâinfiltrating through the Reg[estan] Desert, up from Pakistan and they assembled a lot of commanders in the pocket.” However, he emphasized, “We were controlling the agenda. The only thing that the Taliban had to decide was if they wanted to speed up the agenda, which they tried to do at the end.”
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No one was fooled by the effort it would take to clear the Taliban from the region. The challenge was imposing. Schreiber conceded
Essentially, especially after the 3 August attack [by Lieutenant-Colonel Hope's BG], we realized that we were facing a battalion size defensive position based upon complex obstacles covered by surveillance, indirect and direct fire and incorporating kill zones . . . So this is what we faced: two company positions with strong points from which they [Taliban] would sally forth to conduct ambushes along Highway 1. We were having anywhere between three to five ambushes a day on Highway 1, every day late July and early August . . . and then they had another company defensive position to control the Arghandab River with a C2 [command and control] node in the middle.
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The result was the brigade and BG staffs devoting a great deal of effort to Phase 1 planning and gathering intelligence. Subsequently, the emphasis shifted in the early stages of Phase 2 to “building up”âspecifically to
assembling the combat forces and enablers (e.g., ISR platforms, aviation, close air support (CAS), direct and indirect fire assets), as well as the necessary logistical support.
The Taliban had chosen to build-up and posture themselves in a way that directly challenged the GoA and NATO forces in a conventional manner, namely by digging-in, building fortifications, and holding ground. Despite this brazen but arguably foolish decision (due to the coalition's firepower), the Taliban were not about to make it easy to target them. The enemy operated in teams of roughly platoon equivalent size (i.e., 20â30 fighters) over which effective command and control was maintained. As they had already shown, and would further confirm, they were sophisticated enough to conduct tactical reliefs-in-place and coordinated attacks against their opponents. More importantly, their defences were prepared as strong points, which made extensive use of natural and man-made obstacles and all had interlocking arcs of direct fire with small arms, RPGs, and recoilless rifles. Their indirect mortar fire was responsive and well coordinated. Obstacles on roads were particularly prevalent, with extensive use of pressure-plate IEDs. For example, in a 50-metre span of road leading into a Taliban defensive position five such devices were found. They also widened the existing canal with light equipment so that it could act as a tank trap.