Twenty months after Canada’s combat mission in Kandahar ended, conditions set by Canadian troops before they left the southern Afghan province have helped make possible an uprising against the Taliban by the local population.
Carlotta Gall, the intrepid New York Times reporter who has spent far more time in Afghanistan than any other western journalist, visited the hardscrabble vineyards and orchards of Panjwaii to the southwest of Kandahar City which Canadian troops were responsible for between March 2006 and July 2011. What Gall found this spring was that farmers in dozens of villages in what has long been the Taliban’s spiritual homeland had become so fed up with the brutish behaviour of the Islamic terrorists in their midst that they were now in open revolt against them.
As Gall noted, the uprising in Panjwaii was especially consequential because it was the first to happen in the Taliban’s backyard in southern Afghanistan. It is a monumental shift that got more support a few days ago when a large number of village elders pledged to keep the Taliban out on the eve of what is another fighting season there.
One of the focal points for the rebellion against the Taliban was Zangabad. This village at the western edge of the Horn had been the last major Taliban stronghold in Kandahar before it became the object of immense Canadian attention between the fall of 2010 and the spring of 2011 — a development made possible by a surge of U.S. forces into the south that gave the Canadians a rare chance to concentrate their firepower and other resources in one area.
Faced with a coordinated Canadian-American-Afghan military offensive, the Taliban fled. To make sure they did not re-establish themselves, the Canadians set up a forward operating base and spent $10 million to build a paved road linking Zangabad with Talikhan, Mushan and Bazaar-i-Panjwaii and neighbouring Zhari. But not before conducting intense discussions with elders about what they wanted.
Described by the Canadian commander, Brig.-Gen. Dean Milner, and others at the time “as a dagger through the heart of the Taliban” the new road overseen by Canadian combat engineers turned an eight-hour journey to Kandahar City on a dirt track formerly and aptly known as Route Hyena into a one-hour trip. With this route free of the hundreds of improvised explosive devices that littered the old path, it suddenly became much easier for the farmers to sell their crops in the provincial capital and for their families to shop, get medical attention and schooling there.
Building the road was not easy. The Taliban threw everything it could into trying to stop the project. It murdered some of the 800 Afghan day workers on the project and intimidated those it did not kill with constant harassing fire. To protect them, Canadian Griffon helicopters armed with Gatling guns frequently overflew the construction crews while on the ground tanks and armoured vehicles from the Quebec-based 12th Armoured Regiment and 800 Canadian, U.S. and Afghan troops guarded the flanks.
What the new road did was convince the population that it was in their best interest to distance themselves from the Taliban. After the route opened, casualties in the area dropped by more than 80 per cent.
“The enemy is on its knees here now,” said Brig.-Gen. Hamid Habibi, the charismatic Afghan national army commander in western Kandahar, told me during the summer of 2011. “The truth of it is that it is because of the hard work of the Canadians.”
Habibi credited the road and schools that the Canadians built or refurbished with having had a huge positive effect.
“On top of the military pressure that the enemy is under, our people do not like them,” he said. “The trust the Taliban had from the people has been lost. Even in the most remote areas of Afghanistan they have brought destruction.”
Nothing, as Gall noted, is static in Afghanistan. The Taliban, she reported, has been plotting its revenge from the safe haven that Pakistan offers them across the border in Quetta. Nevertheless, thanks to a bold Canadian initiative, Canadian money and the work of Afghan and Canadian forces backed by follow-on U.S. troops, a particularly dangerous part of Kandahar has become free and has been prospering to such an extent that the population want nothing more to do with the Taliban.
This is a small but notable success for Canada in a war where there have been few clear victories for either side.
