Posts Tagged ‘The Canadian Afghanistan Mission’

The soldiers at Camp Blackhorse don’t care about irony. They are from the 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, and they are about as combat hardened as any Canadian soldiers I’ve met. At the beginning of last November they were just getting rolling on their new task of training the Afghan army and already they were cranky—this new mission was nothing much, to them. A corporal I’d met before in Panjwaii came out to give me a tour of their training grounds. High on a plain up above Kabul, this was the place where fledgling Afghan army companies were taught how to survive combat as a unit. The training ground was vast and largely unprotected. “Does the enemy ever come up here?” I asked. “Yeah,” answered the corporal, nodding across the rolling ground. “Someone just tried to plant an IED on the route over there.” He paused. “Blew himself up though.” Interesting. Only in Afghanistan would a training ground and a battlefield ever get so mixed up. The corporal didn’t find it too interesting; he just liked that the enemy blew himself up.

It was a heat-crazed Afghan afternoon in 2008 when I think maybe I saw through the war. Zangabad is a bad memory, nothing but streaks of confusion and discontent. That day in April the village was mostly deserted, just a labyrinth of tawny mud walls, a few shifty farmers and a disaster of IEDs. I was on patrol with the infantry. Their mission was to provide security for the construction of a new road passing through Haji and Zangabad all the way out to Mushan. The road was scheduled to bring peace and prosperity to western Panjwaii, the most hostile part of the most hostile district in Kandahar province, if not the country. Their mission was not going well. The road was constantly being laced with IEDs. Canadians and Afghans were dying and the whole project was in jeopardy.