Posts Tagged ‘The War in Afghanistan’

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.

Over nearly five years of combat in Kandahar province, the Canadian Forces mission to defeat the insurgent Taliban has been called many things—‘the unexpected war,’ ‘the difficult war,’ ‘mission impossible’—but in the end it will be up to the historians, and history itself, to decide what it all meant. In the meantime, certain things are known: The counter-insurgency campaign waged in Kandahar province from 2006-2011 was the Canadian military’s first period of sustained combat in more than 50 years, since the Korean war. If nothing else, it was a test of military, political and democratic resolve. The effort to combat islamic militancy and international terrorism, borne out of the attacks of September 11, 2001, drew Canada and its military into some harrowing situations. The cost was high. What follows is a timeline of the mission’s Milestones.

Scott Waters has an unusual vantage point for an artist. Over the last two decades he has created a body of work that both supports and tears down the mythology of soldiering. For the three years before that, he lived it. Twenty-three years ago the artist served as an infantryman in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI).

HEARTS AND MINDS ON THE LINE This is part four of Legion Magazine’s story on the efforts of one small Canadian unit to win the hearts and minds of a town in the Taliban heartland last fall. First Platoon of Alpha Company, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry has been in Salavat for a week and a half, living in a small school compound on the edge of town, struggling hard to get a grip on the distrustful, slightly hostile little community in the centre of Panjwai District, the deadliest place for Canadians in all of Kandahar Province. Follow the links to read [...]

This is Part 3 of Legion Magazine’s series on the Canadian effort to win hearts and minds in Salavat, a restive community in Kandahar Province’s notorious Panjwai district.