When Fighting Shadows

Over the past few days I thought I had it all wrong, I fretted that some of the bold pronouncements I've made in these posts would be shown to be flat out bogus, rash, even naive. I began to wonder if maybe this time our Canadian forces in Kandahar would prove all the old lessons wrong and succeed where other armies, some vastly more powerful and vastly more ruthless, had failed time and again.

Until yesterday, the Battle of Panjwai seemed destined to enter the annals of Canadian military history alongside Lundy's Lane or the Scheldt or Paardeberg. Until yesterday the senior officers commanding Canadian forces over there were sure that we were about to hand the Taliban their heads on a platter. We had run them to ground and they were doomed. On Saturday, Brigadier David Fraser pronounced: "We've got the Taliban surrounded." Sure the insurgents were putting up a determined fight but their fate was sealed. Their day of reckoning was going to be 9/11 and how perfect would that be?

To me, it all sounded too good to be true. Had we really wrested the iniative away from the insurgents? Were we really so brilliant and so skilful that we managed to trap them in a 'kill zone' of our making? If this was true, as General Fraser assured us, we Canadians were about to show every other army on the planet 'how it was done' by real professionals.

Whoops, we got it wrong. All the bravado that was pouring out of Fraser and his colonels was just a lot of wishful thinking. On September 11 our troops set out to claim their victory, marching on the hapless Taliban positions. It was 'surrender or die' time for the insurgents. Except when we got there, they'd gone. They had vanished, slipped away to fight another day at a time and place of their choosing, not ours.

But didn't we have these villains surrounded? General Fraser told us they had no way out. Of course the reporters who duly copied all of this down didn't ask the general why the Taliban simply couldn't leave the same way they had been freely coming through our cordon to reinforce their fighters for days.

Turns out we didn't have them surrounded, trapped quite as well as the general claimed. We now know that they left, en masse, and they escaped - get this - to the east, to the west, to the north and, of course, to Pakistan in the south. If they'd all broken through at one point, okay, that stuff can happen. But if they can go in any bloody direction they choose, that doesn't look very good.

We had the armour, we had the heavy guns, we had the artillery, we had the air power, we even had them outnumbered and they slipped away, apparently with incredible ease. According to the rules of an insurgency, the Taliban won this battle if only by virtue of not being annihilated.

I have no doubt that our soldiers fought bravely and well. The problem here isn't at their level. This screw up rests in the laps of General Fraser and his boastful colonels and carries on from there straight to General Hillier, Defence Minister O'Connor and his boss, Little Stevie. This was their show and they botched it.

So, we're not going to have to rewrite the book on guerrilla war and counter-insurgency after all but this might be a good time to take it down off the shelf and read it.