Sweat, blood and tears fall on Afghan soil, but after battle

Mogz

PUBLICATION: GLOBE AND MAIL
IDN: 062020242
DATE: 2006.07.21
PAGE: A3
BYLINE: CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD
SECTION: Column
EDITION: Metro
DATELINE: KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN
WORDS: 1200
WORD COUNT: 1224

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Sweat, blood and tears fall on Afghan soil, but after battle, Canadians push to rebuild

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Christie Blatchford KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN Warrant Officer Hans Kievith yesterday squinted into the blinding white light of the Afghanistan morning and offered a pragmatic assessment as another 45 of his countrymen boarded a Canadian C-130 Hercules en route to Tarin Kot, where the Dutch have their Provincial Reconstruction Office in volatile Uruzgan province.

Asked how public opinion was back home in the Netherlands, he replied serenely, "Oh, at this moment, it's fine. There's no injured and dead people. That's when it changes . . . it's the same in all the countries." How right he was.

A recent Strategic Counsel poll taken for The Globe and Mail and CTV News after the death in combat of Corporal Tony Boneca reveals a dramatic weakening of support in Canada for the mission here.

As pollster Timothy Woolstencroft said of the results, "We think that we're peacekeepers, not peacemakers. Canadians haven't really come to understand that we have a combat role." According to Mr.

Woolstencroft, Canadians' "sense of wellness" about the mission is being eroded.

What curious, sad and on-the-money truths about the modern world are those remarks from the Dutch warrant officer on the ground here and the Canadian pollster back home.

They amount to this: National will, in those countries where it can be said to exist at all, is a fragile and inflexible cord, sure to snap at the sight of a few flag-draped caskets; against all the information available, Canadians (and perhaps the Dutch too) choose to see their soldiers as peacekeepers, though the evidence is clear that the planet long ago pretty much ran out of places where there is a peace to be kept, and tender national psyches shudder at the notion that soldiers may from time to time be killed or, worse from this delicate perspective though few say it so directly, kill other human beings in combat.

For what it's worth, no one here pretends the Canadian coalition mission in Afghanistan is going to be easy, bloodless, quick or even successful.

Virtually everyone in authority I've ever spoken to -- from Canada's bright young light at the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, Chris Alexander, to Brigadier-General Dave Fraser to the commanding officer of the Canadian battle group, Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, to the ordinary infantryman soaked in sweat to British Colonel Chris Vernon, chief of staff for the international brigade headquarters here -- says just the opposite so often it has become a mantra.

Part one of that goes like this: Afghanistan is a near-medieval country devastated by three decades of war, with an illiterate and vulnerable population rife with feudal loyalties and a properly healthy skepticism toward foreign forces and a shattered economy whose only real engine is a drug -- heroin -- much of the West has deemed public enemy No. 1.

Part two acknowledges the mistakes the West has made, chiefly that in the post-U.S. invasion days, when in the name of stability, Afghan gangsters and alleged war criminals were allowed to become part of the new government, but also that in the three years after, the world deliberately turned a blind eye to the rebuilding of the Taliban across the border in Pakistan.

It is in the third part where the hope, faint as it is, lies -- this country will not be helped, let alone "saved," by troops alone.

No one believes this, in my experience, as firmly as the soldiers.

For all the inches of copy that my colleagues and I file about combat operations, that doesn't begin to tell the story of what Canadians, Americans, British and Dutch -- always alongside their counterparts from the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police so as to project the authority of the Afghan national government -- are doing here.

Every day, in the various parts of the south of this country, there are soldiers building or improving roads, running medical outreach clinics, repairing wells and opening schools. There are so many meetings with village elders that the poor elders barely get a day when there isn't someone in a uniform turning up and begging for another shura . Even Afghans, who can talk up a storm, must be damn near talked out, though their good manners and famous hospitality rarely see them turn anyone down.

These are sometimes preposterously small projects carried out in what must appear to Afghan eyes a ludicrously Western manner.

For example, I was in a convoy of combat engineers this week that travelled 30 kilometres out of Kandahar to fix a simple little bridge near the village of Lakhokhail.

Naturally, this bridge, which crosses over a dried-out irrigation culvert, was damaged in the first place by Canadian and coalition vehicles about 10 days earlier as they travelled 12 kilometres farther to the northwest into the Sangin district of Helmand province and encountered a fierce group of Taliban fighters.

What followed, over the course of three days, was some of the fiercest fighting the Canadians have seen here; it was on the second day of this, carried out amid the mud-walled maze of grape fields, that Cpl. Boneca was shot and killed as his platoon was clearing a drying compound.

Yet here were soldiers -- some of whom, like those from 5 and 6 platoons of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry out of Shilo, Man., were actually involved in that fighting -- now returned to fix the little bridge they'd roughed up.

Shortly after the battle, the engineers were out measuring the bridge, then ordering two new cement blocks from a local contractor, and now they were putting it in place. They had only enough gravel to build a ramp at one end, but soon secured a villager who arrived, on what can only be called a jingle tractor (like the dump trucks in Afghanistan, it was riotously decorated), carrying a load of dirt.

Meanwhile, a few klicks away, Taliban fighters attacked a convoy of jingle trucks -- the burp of small-arms fire in this country is as omnipresent as birdsong most anywhere else.

Afterward, the bunch of them -- Afghan civilians and soldiers, Canadians, village elders and a handful of youngsters and the Afghans' gentle trainer, U.S. Major James Francis of St. Louis, Mo., who is a National Guard reservist and history teacher in his real life -- posed for a picture with a hand-painted Afghan government sign, which they carefully took away because it would act as a red flag to the Taliban, who take particular delight in destroying any signs of progress.

It was, all in all, a bit of an exercise in madness, but evidence that this mission is not all about blood and war and death, and that those actually involved in it, Afghans and soldiers alike, are made of sterner stuff than those sitting before the tube, at home.

Simpleton

Mogz

BitWhys

JEFFREY SIMPSON

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

With Israeli bombs blasting Lebanon and dozens of daily killings defining Iraq's civil strife, it's easy to forget Afghanistan, except when a Canadian gets killed and our media blanket the story.

Just now, however, about 600 Canadians are fighting with U.S., British and Afghan soldiers in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan.

Within that province, they have concentrated in the Sangin region; there are as many soldiers and police officers as there are residents.

They aren't having much success, according to news reports, in finding the Taliban and their allies, despite considerable military efforts. While Canada and its allies hunt for the Taliban in this area, the Taliban have captured two other Helmand towns, Garmser and Nawa-i-Barakzayi.

Helmand province, where Britain is supposed to be taking the lead in guaranteeing security, lies west of Kandahar province, where the Canadians have responsibility. Both provinces border on Pakistan. Both have plenty of Taliban activists and sympathizers. Both are what David Richards, NATO's commander in Afghanistan, has called a "post-medieval society." What applies in Helmand would not be dissimilar from Kandahar.

So what's in Helmand, a province with a million people and a thousand dusty villages? The last time British soldiers were in Helmand, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880, the Royal Regiment got wiped out in the Battle of Maiwand along the Helmand River.

A recent report on Helmand from the London-based Senlis Council makes for sobering reading -- the kind it's too bad Canadian parliamentarians and, through them, the Canadian public, didn't hear about before approving a two-year extension of the Canadian mission in southern Afghanistan.

The literacy rate in Helmand is 14 per cent. Discrimination against women is ingrained in the culture. Only 1,305 girls are attending schools, compared with 113,148 boys, at least when the schools are not being attacked. The Senlis Council found that "schools and in particular girls' schools are increasingly coming under attack from the insurgents. Through death threats, insurgents have accomplished the closure of several schools." (Insurgents also target Afghan police and military recruits.)

These "insurgents," the ones Canadians soldiers are hunting, are a mixture of Taliban, al-Qaeda and foreign jihadists who slip across the border from Pakistan, drug lords and tribal chiefs.

They thrive because too many people are poor and feel abandoned or even threatened by interlopers from the West. They can operate easily back and forth across the Pakistani border. They use low-cost techniques such as suicide bombings, beheadings and explosives. There has been a 600-per-cent increase in violent attacks in Helmand in the past six months. More open fighting has accompanied the usual terrorist tactics.

U.S. and NATO spokesmen insist that progress has been made in routing the "insurgents." Senlis reports that "recent incidents suggest the arrival of British troops has done little to deter the insurgency."

The Americans, through Operation Enduring Freedom, did lots of fighting but not much reconstructing. The British and Canadians are supposed to pay much more attention to reconstruction, thereby winning the hearts and minds of the villagers and farmers. It's hard to reconstruct and fight simultaneously, even with the best will in the world.

Helmand, like Kandahar, is saturated by the drug trade. In Helmand, according to Senlis, 26,500 hectares are cultivated with opium poppies and 80,000 with wheat. But opium produces revenue of $143-million, whereas wheat produces $44-million.

The opium trade is therefore lucrative and essential -- for farmers' incomes, feeding endemic corruption (including from government officials), supplying money to warlords and "insurgents." The insurgents get the money by extortion, in exchange for promised protection, or from outright sympathizers.

U.S. and NATO policy is to eradicate the opium-poppy economy and replace it with something else. It's an easy policy to state but a hard one to accomplish when more than a third of the population relies on the drug trade. In Britain, voices are already insisting the U.K. needs more troops in Helmand. It's increasingly obvious that a successful NATO commitment to Afghanistan, especially in the south, isn't going to last two years, but much longer.

Canada, having given its word, can't withdraw from Kandahar. But with the troops, equipment and budget the country has deployed -- given the obstacles in southern Afghanistan -- Canada can't easily succeed, either.

The ridiculously rushed and largely ill-informed parliamentary debate never even came close to outlining these hard facts to the Canadian people.