Op MEDUSA: The Battle
of Panjwaii
Taliban Brigade
Slaughtered
Chose to Fight Rather
than Switch
“It wasn’t the
thousand we killed that was important.”
By Vincent J. Curtis 11
September 2007
Op MEDUSA was the main
Canadian effort in the Kandahar area during the latter half of 2006. It began in August, was completed in
November, and culminated in the climactic battle of Panjwaii in September. The largest Canadian combat operation since
Korea, over a thousand of the enemy were found dead on the battlefield. The outcome of the battle decisively changed
Taliban operations for the remainder of 2006 and throughout 2007.
Canadians tend to
ignore Canadian successes and dwell upon perceived Canadian failures. When told of a silver lining, they grumble
about the existence of a dark cloud. Typical of this style, the importance and
success of MEDUSA was largely ignored in the media and the public consciousness,
until recently. Then, awareness of
MEDUSA was raised by allegations of mismanagement by the senior commanders in
the opening of the battle, leading to the deaths of four Canadian soldiers on 3
September 2006. An errant air strike the
next day led to the death of another and wounded 34.
No good description of
the battle from the command perspective is as yet in the public domain. Context for valid criticism is lacking. For readers to be able to judge for themselves the merits
of the allegations, and to properly evaluate the significance of the Canadian
victory, the author, on behalf of EdC, arranged for this exclusive interview
with BGen David Fraser, who was the overall ISAF commander during the battle.
BGen Fraser
spoke in his office at the Canadian Forces College, and had battle maps and
other intelligence products spread out on the coffee table as he described the
battle. In conversation, he would
sometimes point at a location on the map and say “here,” and to the photograph
of an individual and say “this guy.”
These references are transcribed in square brackets. Square brackets are also used for
clarification.
He got quickly to the point.
“Medusa was made in several
phases. It actually carried on into
November, long after I left. In fact
BAZOOKA, was a continuation of Medusa.
Medusa was a continuation of operations we carried on in July, and June,
and May, and April; and they were a continuation of operations from what
happened a year earlier.”
“I’m going
to give you the macro picture first.
This is the responsibility I had: 220,000 square miles. That’s what we were inheriting. We had a
picture of where the enemy was when we got there. The enemy was very fluid. He moved around a lot. Because he was in a lot of different places,
my forces and the concept I had was we will go and take the initiative and
engage the enemy and disrupt him everywhere.
That means he is now focused on us, and that creates the conditions that
we start reconstruction. The enemy is
not attacking the people, or the reconstruction efforts. That was the intent.”
“There was
probably about a thousand [Taliban], in about platoon sized groups. The groups didn’t operate together, they
operated as little groups. The group
that came from [a particular locale] came from [that particular locale], and it
stayed there. These little groups took
direction from Taliban leaders that were [located in Pakistan.] Each province had a Taliban commander, and
the regional commander would get direction from the big guy, and he would go
off and try to discredit the Afghan government, attack the OEF [Operation
Enduring Freedom, i.e. US forces] or ISAF [International Stabilization and
Assistance Force, i.e. other NATO forces] soldiers, attack construction, attack
schools, to show the Afghan government were not governing, were not in control,
and that the international organization was impotent.”
“They lived
off the land. They intimidated the people.”
Because of the lack of Afghan
national security force, the Taliban were able to control entire districts
except for small pockets centered on a couple of towns.
“All the
tribes have certain issues against each other, and the Taliban plays on those
frictions and those seams to propagate their own agenda. In the absence of an Afghan government,
they’ll go in and run those tribes through sheer force because they are the
warlords and they’ve got the most guns and they will use them.”
“So
what? We might go in there. I might have done 99 per cent of the
work. The 1 per cent which was the most
important thing was I listened to an Afghan who told me where to go and what to
do.”
“When I
first got into Helmund, the governor told me ‘I control [these two towns.] I need to control [these three other
towns.] That’s where I need to expand my
area of influence. I want you to go and
oust the Taliban out of [two of the three places] so that I can insert my
mayor, my chief of police, and an Afghan National Security Force.’”
Okay, so you go in, shoo the flies away,
you go away and the flies come back. If
you stick around, you have isolated platoons, your force is divided, and you
have given up the initiative.
“In some
respects, but we are moving around all the time. They never get a chance to settle. You go in, you shoo the flies away, and you
keep doing it and that is the disruption I was aiming for. Americans were doing that before I got
there. When I show up, I doubled the
size of the force, [and increased the area in which Taliban operations were
disrupted.] We keep shooing the flies
away to allow that governor to install his people. The Taliban were being disrupted, and it
worked.”
“We were
shooing the flies away up into July, 2006.
But we knew something else was happening. We were getting intelligence that [Panjwaii]
was being built up. On the third of
August, he was an enemy that wasn’t in the size of thirty. He wasn’t in the size of one hundred. He was in the size of about five
hundred.” They had all congregated in
the area of Panjwaii.
On the
third of August the intelligence picture changed. “We figured out that he had changed his
tactics, and mentally he had changed. On
the third of August we had figured out his intent. He had gone from being an unconventional
force to being a conventional force. In
insurgency doctrine when the insurgents think they are strong enough they will
go conventional and actually take on the legitimate authorities, and it is
their main effort.”
“In August
the Taliban decided that their main effort for 2006 would be to take on the
Afghan government and the international community. They’re saying ‘we can defeat you.’”
What make them think that? “Historically, [the area around Panjwaii] has
always been the ground the insurgents have selected to have taken on whoever
the authorities were at the time, and in history they always won.”
“Les Grau. That’s where I’ve heard of this before. In July, I said ‘I’ve seen something here
that I’ve read before.’ It was in The Other Side of the Mountain. The Mujahedin fought the Soviets on this
piece of ground twenty years earlier.
They picked the ground. Why? Because the ground is World War I on
steroids. It is threatening the
strategic center of gravity for the southern part of Afghanistan, called the
city of Kandahar. The center of gravity
of the Pashtun tribes, of that society, of that region is the city of
Kandahar. Whatever affects the city of
Kandahar affects the entire society. The
Taliban wanted to show the Afghan people, the Afghan government and the international
community that they can put pressure on Kandahar city, show your weakness, and
we can beat you.”
The
Panjwaii area lies between thirty and fifty kilometers west of Kandahar, south
of Highway 1, the main route of transportation in that area of the
country. It straddles the Arghandab
River. It is about twenty kilometers by
ten kilometers in size, or two hundred square kilometers. Besides being defensible ground, it forms a
convenient staging area for movement into the mountains around Kandahar, and
eventually for infiltration into the city itself. Fraser estimated that the Taliban actually wanted
ISAF to attack them in Panjwaii, as the Soviets had previously. The Taliban calculated that if they could
inflict enough casualties on ISAF and the ANA, the international community and
the Afghan government would give up. The
Taliban would then claim to have beaten the Afghans and the international
force, and they did it on the ground of their choosing. ‘It worked before, I want to do the same
thing again.’
“That was
their intent. I will counter their
intent.”
“They
thought, wrongly I would say, they could take on ISAF, meaning the
international community, because they thought we were not as strong as the
Americans. For What? The key was, we had been beating them up, and
for some reason they thought they could beat us. And they put initially about five hundred
fighters in [Panjwaii] from five different provinces.”
This concentrated the bulk of the
Taliban fighting force in Fraser’s area of responsibility in Panjwaii, inviting
Fraser to attack. “They’ve got them all
in there.”
“That was
the bad news. The good news was that I
knew where they all were. So instead of
fighting groups of thirty everywhere, I had them all in one spot. They put their main effort here. They put their main leadership here. This was the battle they thought could finish
the war. Right there in the summer and
fall of 2006.”
Fraser was
limited in his ability to concentrate his force. The Taliban still had small groups outside
Panjwaii, and ISAF presence was necessary to maintain the confidence of the
people in the rest of the region. “We
had to show the people we’re not going to run away.”
The enemy
force was all concentrated in one area, leaning on a strategic nerve, Fraser
knew where they all were, and Fraser’s plan was to defeat the enemy.
You mean destroy.
“Defeat. Not destroy.
To destroy the enemy means doctrinally to me that he is incapable of
mounting or conducting any more offensive operations against you. You cannot destroy the Taliban รก la Napoleon
in one battle. The war was not going to
end. All we could do was make a
significant improvement in the situation.
And we did.”
Fraser
started Medusa with a soft-knock approach.
He asked the tribal elders and the provincial governors to speak to the
Taliban in Panjwaii and invite them to come over to the government side, or to
leave. Many of the Taliban fighters were
local boys who joined the Taliban for the pay.
Coming from the area, they had a stake in its future, and the future
offered by the Afghan government was better than anything offered by the
Taliban. Moreover, sheer numbers told
against them. There was simply no way that
500 Taliban could govern by force a province of one million people, 700,000 of
them in Kandahar itself.
“I wanted
to resolve this without firing a shot.”
That
approach didn’t work, and the decision was made to take them out with force.
“While this
discussion is going on, we [deployed our forces around Panjwaii.]”
The
deployment of forces appears on the accompanying map.
“[Panjwaii]
is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen in my life. It is just dirt thing that has this river
running through it.”
The
Arghandab River is from two to four hundred meters wide, from a few centimeters
to 1.5 meters deep, and swift flowing only in a few areas. It is fordable for a lot of its length in the
area of operation.
“We started
our operations from the south going across the river. Why?
Firepower, protection, and mobility.
All the open space enabled us to maximize the observation capability our
vehicles offered us, the distance with our weapons systems enabled us to engage
[outside the range of Taliban weapons], as opposed down from the north. [From the north] is all close terrain. The south was more conducive to us. They could see us, but we could stand off.”
The initial main effort was from
the south across the river, and the effort from the north was supporting. A subsidiary effort was made against Sperwan
by a US/ANA force. A Taliban force from
Sperwan could operate against the flank and rear of the main effort from the
south, but the US/ANA force kept the Taliban in Sperwan occupied. Dutch and Danish forces formed a screen to
the north and west of the operational area.
They kept Highway 1 open, and could catch stragglers trying to escape
the battle.
The plan of
attack was to crush the Taliban force that was known to be concentrated in
Pashmul between the jaws of a pincer movement from the north and south. The remnants of that force would be driven
west into Sia Choy, down the river from Pashmul. After the US/ANA force captured Sperwan, they
would pivot northwards towards Sia Choy, and Sia Choy would be crushed in turn
between the jaws of the pincer formed by the US/ANA force from the south and
the Canadian force from the East.
“On the
third [of September] was the time to say ‘let’s move.’ In hindsight, we made the right decision
together. Collectively, we all. That was the right thing to do because the
results of the battle speak for themselves.
We’re not talking about a failure.
We killed over a thousand bad guys here.”
“But it’s
not about bodies. Its success for me was
when [the tribal elders and provincial governors, including President Karzai’s
brother] came up to me at the end and said ‘thank you.’ For the first time they were all confident
that they could actually beat the Taliban, because they’d just been. For the first time in Afghan history the guy
who was defending, lost. The head of the
Afghan army was giddy.”
“Here’s
what happened. On the third, we crossed,
we actually broke in and we got on top of these guys. So the decision process of ‘was the third a
good day to attack?’: we got into the enemy’s backyard. We got in there, into his house. So, yes.
Did it cost four lives that day? Yes, and that is a tragic part of this
battle that we were going to incur casualties.
We got in though, and we proved that we could get into the house, and
therefore the decision was validated, and we needed to press the attack. Now, what nobody planned for was on the 4th [of
September] this A-10 coming in and having situational disorientation. Bad
accident. He killed a soldier and wounded thirty-four. No one anticipated that.”
“So
what? The planned called, again, to
cross the river and go back into here.
No. The opportunity was that the
enemy now knew that I was coming in there.
I’d been in there once. Okay, I’m
going to surprise you. I’m going to deceive
you. I’m going to take Omer [i.e. LCol
Omer Lavoie and the main part of his battle group, leaving C Coy in place], and
bring him around and reinforce the unit that’s up here [i.e. B Company to the
north], and now that unit’s not just one [company], he’s two, three times
bigger than the enemy. I created this
American led task force [where the main effort had been]. The job I gave Task Force Grizzly was [to
deceive the enemy into believing that the main effort would come from the
south.] ‘I want [the enemy] to think you
are a 1000 man battle group, like Omer.
I want you to keep the pressure on him because I’ve sent Omer around to
the north, and we’re going to attack him from a different direction.’”
“That was
the opportunity that two bad days gave us.”
“C Company
had two hard days. On the third and on
the fourth. On the fourth C Company lost
their company commander and their entire chain of command. C Company needed a little bit of time to get
their thoughts together. They weren’t
shaken, they just needed a little bit of time to get their thoughts
together. I gave them that time, I
pumped them up with some other assets to create Task Force Grizzly, and they were
in the battle. They never left the
battle. They never left the battle, and
they were on Rugby at the end when 1 RCR defeated the enemy in Pashmul.”
“Up until the third, every time we
saw a bona fide target, military necessity, collateral damage estimated was
mitigated, we hit it with something, direct fire, indirect fire, to keep the
pressure on."
The Taliban did not break and run from their positions
under pressure from the Canadians. Rugby,
the code name for Pashmul, was "a hard nut." What came as a surprise to Fraser was
Sperwan. It turned out that Sperwan was
the main training base of the Taliban, and Taliban were crossing the river in
broad daylight in trucks to reinforce Sperwan against the US/ANA attack.
"We killed probably 300 plus in Sperwan. They were coming across in broad daylight out
of Sia Choy on the backs of trucks in broad daylight to reinforce
[Sperwan.] In broad daylight. And we were just engaging them, and we were
shaking our heads wondering 'what have we just hit?' We knew there was something there."
The force attacking Sperwan was bigger than a company but
smaller than a battalion. There were
American forces, ANA, two 105s that were supporting them with a company from
the RCDs, all working in unison. The
American forces had humvees. No tanks,
not even Bradleys. "The Canadians
were the best equipped over there."
The
Taliban were standing and fighting, "they did not run."
Medusa killed twice as many Taliban as
intelligence estimates initially guessed were in the area.
"Well, because they did two reliefs in place while we
were there. They were funneling them in,
some of them" through the screen to the west, and the rest through the
'hole in the bag' in the south-west area of Panjwaii. "And that was fine."
"Did we watch them exfil? Yes. Did many of them get out?" No. "I'm just saying it was a bloody
fight."
"But it wasn't the thousand we killed that was
important. It was the fact these men in
the end [referring to the legitimate provincial governors] had a province and a
district to govern and they had a belief and a confidence that they could
actually do this now. And beat the
Taliban."
"What's the other effect on the Taliban? The Taliban put a number, the majority of
their senior leadership in there. We
killed most of their leadership. Now,
they replaced them within weeks, but the result of this is the Taliban has
never attacked us like this since then."
"We took them from that defensive mode [referring to
the first phase of Mao's three phase theory of insurgency], they got offense
and aggressive, which is a dangerous evolution, we pushed them back an
evolutionary step [i.e. back into the first phase of insurgency]. The bad news is they are still attacking with
suicide bombs, they're still attacking with IEDs, now they're going after
Afghans. It's indiscriminate. They're
going after the international aide workers and whatnot, and that's not
good."
These tactics are ultimately self-defeating. It enables President Karzai to say that he
his there to build.
"There are now ten to thirty thousand people living
there that weren't living there before" in a fertile area that is growing
a lot more than drugs. "That sounds
to me like progress."
"The fact that the governor there is still governing
and hasn't quit, or hasn't been assassinated, the fact that you still have that
leadership there, also tells me that they believe in what they're doing and
they’re still fighting for the future of their people."
"We were not going to win this in 2006. We were not
going to win this in one Napoleonic battle like Waterloo."
"Governance. It
was all about the governors here and the leaders, and the security." The successful outcome of the battle created
the conditions that enabled them to operate much more securely, and they are
working on behalf of the Karzai government with whom we are allied.
"There were ANA units here from three different
Corps. They’re performance was good. As
good as us? No. But I'm not comparing them
to us. There were three Corps there and the people saw they were
reliable."
Referring to the pursuit of the broken Taliban force west
of Sia Choy, Fraser continued, "We pushed this way. When we hit the 24 Easting, we stopped. We ran into people. When the people saw us, they started moving
away, because the pamphlets, the leaflets we had dropped [prior to the battle]
said to do this. We said 'We don't want
you to do this, we will stop here. Our
fight's not with you. Our fight's with
the bad guys, not with you.'"
It was reported in
some of these stories that B Company was 50 in strength when they crossed. Now, that's a little light for a
company. Is that because they were
caught in transition when they had only a platoon plus across?
"You are going to have to ask the battalion commander
and the company commander. The battalion
commander handles his battalion. He had
guns available to him, he had the LAVs available to him." Did he
have smoke on call, available?
"He ran the battalion. If he
saw a hostile act or hostile intent [inaudible]"
Fraser placed the responsibility for the details of the
tactical crossing of the river upon the shoulders of the battalion and the
company commander. His position was that
since the river crossing was the main effort, anything the battalion commander
wanted was available to him on a first priority basis.
Why wasn't there an
infantry screen in front of the vehicles, and what was a G-Wagon doing in the
lead element of a river crossing?
"Those are tactics; those are questions you ask
them. But, at the end of the Charles
Company won, 1 RCR won."
What about the
change in plan?
“A plan is a guide.
No plan survives first contact.”
It's hard to say,
but four guys killed in a company attack when you killed a thousand, and an
attack of that scale? Those aren't bad
numbers. I mean, even in one day.... I
know it's hard.
"One soldier's life is too much. I handled the commendations over there. Every distinction meant some soldier had to
put his or her life in jeopardy. They
were all precious to me. Whatever I
could do to mitigate it, I did. "
But you also had to
mitigate the damage that would be inflicted by this battle. Do think that you, consciously or
unconsciously, restrained the amount of firepower you could have used in order
to preserve something for people to move back into?
"I made a commitment to the governor and [inaudible]
that anything I broke or destroyed, I would fix. We would fix.
I asked for a tank system over there because I wanted to use something more
precise, and had a psychological effect.
A 2000 lb GPS-guided bomb, while its effective, I wanted something that
was less destructive."
* * *
What began as a request from a provincial governor for
assistance to ensure the harvest and delivery to market of the grape crop,
ended with the destruction of the Taliban force in Panjwaii and the deaths of
at least three senior Taliban commanders in the battle. MEDUSA wrecked the combat capability of the
Taliban for the remainder of 2006, and it destroyed the sense of inevitability
that is psychologically useful in any political campaign. The campaign season of 2007 has seen only
IEDs and roadside bombings that are typical of an insurgency at the beginning
of its development. MEDUSA was a real
set-back for the Taliban, and it created the conditions for political and
economic progress in the Kandahar theatre during 2007, and perhaps farther into
the future. Political and economic
progress operates even more effectively against the Taliban than a military
setback.
The need for tanks that was discovered during the attack
led directly to the acquisition of 120 new Leopard 2 A6s for the Canadian army,
which had written off heavy armour in its most recent changes of doctrine.
The outcome of the Battle of Panjwaii was a decisive
tactical victory for the Canadians over the Taliban. Turning a tactical victory into political
progress is not a job entirely in Canadian hands, but Canada is doing its part in
the team effort for the cause of peace, order, and good government in
Afghanistan.
Are lessons to be learned?
There always are. One lesson
learned was the need for heavy armour, i.e. tanks. Laser-guided 2000 lb bombs are extremely
destructive, and saturating Pashmul with such heavy ordinance would be a case
of destroying the village in order to save it.
Kandahar province is territory our side controls, and destroying
villages and agricultural districts in the process of killing the Taliban amounts
to a mixed blessing to the people living there, who are supposed to be our people. Saturation bombing of the home turf when it
can be avoided isn’t the smartest of ideas.
Air strikes and artillery were said to be ineffective
against the Taliban positions because they were dug in too deep when C Company
called for support during the attack.
Criticism that two day’s saturation bombing would have been more
effective than when that fire was on-call and closely directed is not
explained. What became obvious was that
a tank-led assault that would combine the armour protection lacking in a
G-Wagon with the precise, direct, heavy fire of a 105 mm gun was exactly what
the situation called for. A WWI
defensive position on steroids called for a WWI solution on steroids: the
modern tank. Because of that assault on
Panjwaii, the Canadian army has tanks again.
The game of ‘woulda, coulda, shoulda’ can always be
played, especially when refighting a battle.
But the alternative can also be advanced: It was a prodigy that we suffered
as few casualties as we did. Considering
the scale of losses suffered by the enemy in close fighting, Canadians should
be grimly content with the battle. The
important thing is whether commanders absorbed the lessons to be learned from
the battle. It appears that they have.
-XXX-
