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7. A Long Goodbye (2010–2014) · The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan

• ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: [Music begins]. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti, and this is The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan. We left off our last episode just as Canada was shifting into its final phase in Afghanistan. At the start of 2010, Canada had been fighting in Kandahar for four years, and up to that point, 138 Canadian soldiers had been killed. And though the Taliban had been battered, they were not broken. Meanwhile back home, public support for the mission was fading. Canada had decided to end its combat mission in 2011. What came next would be about training and building the Afghan army and police force that would eventually have to hold the country on their own. Canada’s commitment in Afghanistan would wind up completely by 2014. [Music ends]. But first, someone had to close out the war in Kandahar. Brigadier-General Dean Milner served as the last Canadian combat commander in the province. DEAN MILNER: You know, Afghanistan was a challenge. Canadians had been there for quite some time fighting the Taliban and fighting the counter-insurgency fight in Afghanistan. TREMONTI: Milner took command of Joint Task Force Afghanistan in September 2010, after 30,000 American troops flooded into Afghanistan under the command of U.S. General David Petraeus. The U.S. surge was meant to break the Taliban’s momentum and buy time for the Afghans to finally secure their own country. Milner’s job was to make the most of the window the surge had bought and then hand responsibility for Kandahar over to the Americans. This phase for him was less about fighting and more about doing the footwork, patrolling through villages, getting to know the locals, all in order to stop threats before they grew lethal. MILNER: Well, it felt good. I mean it, you know, General Petraeus being the Commander, you know, they just put troops in the right places and I knew that we could be successful. So it enabled me to develop and further develop my plan of a village approach, where you went in village by village, and you met with the elders, you worked with the local Afghans,  You, you looked at the governance situation, the economic situation, and, you know, because counterinsurgency is a difficult, complex fight because you’re working governance, you’re working the economics, the development side, and you’re working the security at war fighting side. TREMONTI: The enemy was often indistinguishable from any Afghan civilian. So for Milner, the only answer was to be everywhere, all the time, finding weapons caches, running special operations, and wearing down the Taliban’s sense of safety in their own territory. The fear that had kept Afghan civilians silent was starting to crack. MILNER: What was also positive, I think, was for some of the first times that the Afghans were starting to tell us where the Taliban were. Because there’d been that fear, the domination with the Taliban, the fear factor. And from our intelligence side, we were starting to receive a bit more intelligence from the locals about where the Taliban were. So that was another nature of us being able to be more aggressive on the intelligence side and again, the patrolling in every different village that we were responsible for. TREMONTI: Among the Afghan officers Milner worked alongside in Kandahar, one stood out. Brigadier-General Ahmad Habibi. He had served in the Afghan military for years before the Canadians arrived. He fought through the Soviet occupation, the civil war, and the Taliban’s first rise to power. General Habibi’s interpreter is Amal Din. He worked as Milner’s language and cultural advisor in Afghanistan. AHMAD HABIBI: [Speaking in Pashto] AMAL DIN: In 2001, when ISAF decided to come to Afghanistan, at the time there were no infrastructures, no schools, no hospitals, especially no Afghan National Army. And that is when the Canadian forces arrived alongside the NATO. Kandahar, which was the most unsecured province in Afghanistan, was at the time under extreme insecurity. Some of the districts such as Zhari, Dand and Panjwai specifically were under the control of the enemy and people were living under the rules of the enemy at the time. HABIBI: [Continues speaking in Pashto] TREMONTI: The two generals soon became inseparable. MILNER: So him and I patrolled together, we ate together, we did everything together, because one of my roles was to help mentor him and his brigade, because I knew eventually Canada would leave, eventually the Americans would leave. So how much effort I put into working with his soldiers, him himself — and we just created a fantastic soldier-general relationship and essentially did everything together. TREMONTI: Their partnership also produced something tangible, a paved, asphalt road through Panjwai district, the heart of Taliban territory. MILNER: And we built this road. And it was huge. It was huge for Kandahar, the province. It was huge for the district. And it was really important for the troops because they all walked the road, they all moved their vehicles, their trucks, their donkeys with the trailers, everything. HABIBI: [Speaking in Pashto] DIN: Out of all these projects, this road that you mentioned was the most significant and the most important. Number one, that was that the people of Kandahar needed a road because the farmers were not able to bring their crops to the city on time. If a family had an emergency or an ill family member, there were just fields. Number one was this and number two was that this road was a significant strategic road for us. And that is because the enemy was so much in the urban area that we were not able to patrol those areas. So this road brought stability and convenience for people and it also brought security to the region because then we were able to continuously patrol the roads and push the enemy away from the region. TREMONTI: The road was one part of a broader Canadian strategy, not just to clear the Taliban from the ground, but to improve daily life for Afghans, with security and development running on parallel tracks. ANDREW BURTCH: So they would basically try to provide for an oasis of development, I suppose, an oasis of security in this area with the hopes of creating an example that other communities may wish to emulate and to get those communities to assume more responsibility for their security. TREMONTI: Andrew Burtch, the Post-1945 Historian at the Canadian War Museum, has been our guide this season. BURTCH: And so that was one of the strategies that Canada pursued, in addition to other operations like seeking to rehabilitate the Dahla Dam and improving irrigation in Kandahar proper. So there’s a lot of different lines of effort that were being pursued during these times but operating in a fairly smaller area. TREMONTI: The Dahla Dam Project was one of Canada’s largest development investments in Afghanistan, a commitment of 50-million dollars. The goal was to rehabilitate the dam and its irrigation system that had once supplied farming communities across Kandahar Province. At its peak, the system could irrigate around 36,000 hectares of land. By the time Canada arrived, decades of war and neglect had reduced that system to a fraction of its former reach. LISA VANDEHEI: Most Canadians understand the project as being about the Dam, so the Dahla Dam and repairing it, and that’s fine. But it’s actually, it’s about more than the Dam and it’s certainly about more than even just engineering. TREMONTI: Lisa Vandehei spent 14 months in Afghanistan. She was a soldier in the Canadian Armed Forces with more than 10 years of service, but came to Afghanistan as a civilian with CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency. She managed the Dahla Dam Project on the ground. Repairing the dam required working directly with local communities, going into areas under Taliban influence, with Afghan partners who risked their lives simply by showing up. VANDEHEI: Because it was dangerous for them if they were seen working with a foreigner, it was very, very dangerous for them. And I was actually repeatedly surprised at their willingness to risk their lives to work with us for the benefit of their own communities. I’ve asked two men directly, I’m not gonna say their names obviously, but, you know, “Why the heck would you work with us? I just can’t believe it. Why would you do that?” And there was one old man in a district and we asked him in the middle of a shura and he was about 87 years old, he thinks — there was no record of his birth — he held his thumb and forefinger to his chin and he lifted his head up and he made a slashing noise across his throat [makes noise] and then he indicated with his hand that two smaller members of his family had been killed by insurgents and this was his way of, of bringing something to his community just to spite them, despite everything that was going on, to make it happen. TREMONTI: While those infrastructure projects moved forward in fits and starts, by the spring of 2011, the war itself was changing. Osama bin Laden was dead, killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in a compound in Pakistan. And that July, Canada formally handed Kandahar over to the American forces, completing the withdrawal of its combat troops. Milner didn’t think Canada should be leaving just yet. MILNER: I would like Canadians to have stayed in Kandahar a few more years. You make decisions, politically and all that, but you know, we’d put a lot of work into it. And now we were having to give this command back to the Americans. And this was a tough sector. TREMONTI: Canada had set July 2011 as the end of its own combat mission, a deadline the Canadian government, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had made firm and public. Critics argued that announcing departure dates handed the Taliban a calendar. And all they had to do was wait. General Habibi was optimistic that the training would hold. That the Canadian mentorship left the Afghan National Army stronger than when they started. HABIBI: [Speaking in Pashto] DIN: The team that was responsible for training the Afghan National Army, specifically my brigade, our men in Afghan National Army were trained in the sectors of engineering, the artillery, first aid, and so on. These trainings were so effective that the results of 2011 when the Canadian forces were withdrawing and leaving Afghanistan, our teams were able to successfully plan operations and execute them according to the rules and regulations of Afghan National Army and also be able to be part of the reconstructions in Afghanistan. And I could clearly say that 80 per cent of those three districts mentioned earlier — Zhari, Dand, and Panjwai — were in much better positions, and the local populace could freely continue their daily lives. HABIBI: [Continues speaking in Pashto] BURTCH: But it was by and large a pretty seamless handover to the Americans. You know, as for the sacrifices that were made there in Kandahar, I think every soldier will have different perspectives on that. ANDREW MCCUISH: It was a feeling of the job wasn’t done, you know? TREMONTI: Lieutenant Andrew McCuish served with the Royal Canadian Dragoons just as American forces were beginning to take over from Canada. MCCUISH: It was just, it was leaving with the feeling of this is a political problem, you know, we provide that security piece, but that’s as much as we could do. And it was concerned of what was going to happen, and then when it did happen with the fall, it was, yeah — feeling of a job not done was kind of the biggest feeling I had when I left. And it just, yeah, it wasn’t in the cards. BRADEN GREAVES: So, at the time it was just, this is my job. We’re transitioning to a training mission after this. We’re going to rip out with the Americans. TREMONTI: Captain Braden Greaves served with the 1st Battalion, Royal 22nd Regiment — the Van Doos — Canada’s last battle group in Kandahar. GREAVES: Is it an end of an era of Canadian military, like war fighting involvement in Afghanistan? Absolutely. And I recognized the significance of that. But at the time, it didn’t seem like it was a huge deal for me because there was still that continuity, right? Like, we were still there. We were just changing to a training mission, and the Americans were taking over. TREMONTI: By now, the war in Kandahar was no longer Canada’s to shape. After Canada ended its combat mission in Kandahar, Canadian personnel were now based primarily in Kabul, with smaller contingents in Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat. Their new job was to build the Afghan National Security Force, training soldiers and police toward a target strength of 352,000, enough to defend the country without NATO doing it for them. BURTCH: So essentially their job was to, at various different levels, from national command element down to essentially the Kandak level or the battalion level, to give the special skills necessary to function as a modern armed force and to more capably fight the Taliban. WAYNE EYRE: So this was the first time in Canadian military history that we did combat advising at this scale. TREMONTI: Then Lieutenant-Colonel Wayne Eyre commanded the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team, or OMLTs, back in 2007. EYRE: The analogy of building a plane while in flight has been used many times. But this for me was a force generation nightmare because we’d never done this before. TREMONTI: Training an army while fighting a war is hard enough. Doing it in a country where the enemy might be standing next to you was something else entirely. The Afghan National Army was a force unlike any Eyre had encountered. It wasn’t really a unified institution. More like a collection of overlapping loyalties, histories, and tribal affiliations layered on top of each other. Understanding who was fighting alongside you, and why, was as important as teaching them any tactical skill. Eyre returned to Afghanistan in 2014, this time as Commander of NATO Training Mission Afghanistan. The doubts he’d carried since 2007 had remained. EYRE: And my concern, and I reviewed my notes as I left Afghanistan in 2007, was maintaining the cohesion of a national army with especially one that could be riven with divided loyalties. I had some doubts about the viability of Afghanistan and the Afghan National Army going forward. They could fight if they were well led at the lower tactical level, but they were lacking those elements that made a military professional. The ability to conceive and plan operations on their own, larger scale operations. the ability to sustain themselves, so organize logistics to keep them fed, fueled with the supply of ammunition in the field. The ability to conduct personal administration over the long haul. TREMONTI: The so-called “green-on-blue attacks” were also a constant worry, when Afghan soldiers or police turned their weapons on NATO forces. By the end of 2012, insider attacks had killed more than a hundred coalition troops. All NATO troops were ordered to carry loaded weapons at all times, even when training alongside their ANA partners. BURTCH: And these were a bit of a puzzle because the question was, “Was this a coordinated Taliban campaign to take out and undermine the training mission? Was it the product of cultural differences or insults to the dignity of trainees by insensitive trainers that provoked a response? Did they enlist with the explicit purpose to carry out a green-on-blue attack or an insider attack? Is this something that they would take their skills and resources and then go and join the insurgency?” That was always a risk of any part of the training mission.  And there had always been a bit of wariness of cooperation with Afghan National Security Forces in terms of doing things like operational security in preparing for mission. There would be like NATO eyes only, or, or it’d only be informed and the Afghan troops would be brought in in Kandahar only when a lot of the sensitive preparations had begun, to a point where they could not perhaps leak to the enemy that that was happening. TREMONTI: There were other factors too, such as language barriers, high illiteracy rates, and deep cultural differences, all which created friction long before the threat of violence entered the picture. For Canadian trainers, navigating all of that was the daily reality. Remarkably, not a single Canadian life was lost to a green-on-blue attack. Dean Milner had served as Brigadier General during Canada’s final combat operations in Kandahar in 2011. He returned to Afghanistan, this time to Kabul, as the Commanding General tasked with training the Afghan army. MILNER: That was such an important task, but it was such a huge task. You can imagine how long it takes to train and build the institution of any Western army, years and years and years and years. TREMONTI: [Tremonti addressing Dean Milner]. Well, in fact, you said, even in 2011, you said this, that the gains were reversible and fragile. MILNER: Yes. TREMONTI: [Tremonti addressing Dean Milner]. What did you mean? MILNER: You know, I just had a sense that the Afghan National Army was not yet ready. You know, the backbone of your country is a police force. The Afghan National Police, they were very, very still poorly trained. We’d put a lot of work into them. There was still the, you know, the country was fragmented. And again, the infrastructure, the economy was nowhere near, the schools were nowhere near where we needed to be. So there was, you know to win that kind of, it’s a generational fight, that takes a long time. TREMONTI: [Tremonti addressing Dean Milner]. Well, let’s talk about the next steps. Because by May 2013, you are back in Afghanistan, but it’s different. You’re in Kabul, not Kandahar, and you’re building institutions. You’re not fighting the Taliban. What was that shift like for you? MILNER: It was a tough decision. I’d just recently been there for a year. You know, it’s tough on the family, but you know, I was again passionate and I knew that we had so much more work to do. So I was, I was, I was very proud and very excited at the same time to be going back in to try and again, from a different perspective, to train the Afghans, train the police, to build their basic training, to build their, you know, equivalents of the Royal Military College. And we were doing some great things. You know, we were elevating and improving their institutions. And so I was very excited to be doing that. I was back in country with a bunch of Afghans that I had met and soldiered alongside. General Habibi is there now in a different capacity. So that was, it was quite exciting. TREMONTI: The Canadians were helping Afghans build the foundations of a Western military, with things like formal recruiting systems, basic training protocols, and schools for officers. MILNER: And also, we were building the police force training capability. So wasn’t just the army, it was also the police. So that was a huge mission. It was a huge responsibility. By the time we left, we were feeling good. But again, there was so much more work to be done. And arguably, nobody really followed us into our positions when we left, because most of the other countries were busy in their own areas of responsibility. They were still out in the fight. TREMONTI: As 2014 approached, the NATO coalition was now stretched across the country. American forces held Regional Command East, covering the rugged border provinces of Kunar, Nuristan and Nangarhar, where al-Qaeda and Taliban networks ran deep into Pakistan. British forces and US Marines were in Helmand, where the opium trade and the insurgency were still tightly intertwined. The Germans held the north under Regional Command North, based out of Mazar-e-Sharif. The Italians were in the west. Every nation was still managing its own piece of the country. Nobody had spare capacity to pick up what Canada was leaving behind. MILNER: So they were still busy conducting their mentorship with the Afghan forces on the ground and still fighting the Taliban. So when we left, there was still a lot of work to be done. So those big institutions like the military college frameworks, they were very nascent. And these schools, again, without us, they were barely capable of running. TREMONTI: And then, it was over. On March 12, 2014, Corporals Gavin Early and Harry Smiley lowered the maple leaf flag at NATO’s ISAF headquarters in Kabul. Major-General Dean Milner placed it in the hands of Canada’s Ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, Deborah Lyons. The baton carrying the last Canadian flag flown in Afghanistan is in the Canadian War Museum’s Gallery 4. Three days later, the last 84 Canadian soldiers left Afghanistan. [Tremonti addressing Dean Milner]. What was that like after all that had been invested in Afghanistan, and all the lives that had been lost? MILNER: Well, I’ll be honest, I was not for it. You know, I didn’t feel good leaving. The Afghan National Police capabilities just weren’t as far along as we needed to be, and you know, saying goodbye to the Afghans too for the last time was tough, saying goodbye to a General Habibi this probably last time, you know, you’re staying and fighting and Canadians were going home. HABIBI: [Speaking in Pashto] DIN: Like I mentioned earlier, it was a sad moment for me to say goodbye to my friend who fought alongside me, was with me 24/7. We were challenged so many times. Afghanistan has a very complex system and as we know that Afghanistan has been under the influence of 40 years of war and I could clearly see our Canadian friends leaving and showing worries about Afghan National Army, specifically my brigade. And I would like to mention that there were lots of accomplishments from 2006 to 2011. And I am sure that my Canadian friends were worried to see if the Afghan National Army has the ability or the capability to keep the accomplishments or not. That was one of their concerns. The other concern that I see that it is clear that in Afghanistan we had a lot of political challenges and a lot of personal interests were a big problem for the Afghan National Army, so I can clearly see that they were so worried in regards to that political challenges. HABIBI: [Continues speaking in Pashto] TREMONTI: Not long after Canada left, Afghanistan held a presidential election to replace outgoing President Hamid Karzai. It was the first time an election led to a peaceful transfer of power between civilian governments. Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah emerged as the top two candidates. As the Taliban stepped up their operations across the country, and amid allegations of ballot-stuffing, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry brokered a national unity agreement. The candidates would share power. It wasn’t a perfect election, but by any measure of Afghan history, it was remarkable. EYRE: Sixty percent of the population showed up to vote, very comparable to Western democracies. So this was actually a point of psychological hope, success in the spring of 2014. TREMONTI: General Eyre also felt Canada’s departure should have been timed to this election, leaving on a note of democratic achievement rather than budgetary necessity. EYRE: You know, on one hand, we were told that we were a country that wouldn’t cut and run a number of years before that. Yet we were doing just that. On the other hand, how do you make a dignified exit out of an operation? And so you have to weigh those two. I thought the timing could have been much better. TREMONTI: By the time Canada left, the political and military architecture holding Afghanistan together was already fragile. But the decisive blow would come six years later, at a negotiating table in the Qatari capital. The Doha Agreement was signed on February 29, 2020, between the Trump administration and the Taliban, without the Afghan government present. It committed the U.S. and its coalition partners to a full troop withdrawal in exchange for Taliban promises not to harbour al-Qaeda or attack U.S. forces and its allies. The deal also called for the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Critics argued it legitimized the Taliban as a political actor and demoralized the Afghan government and its armed forces. It also set a firm timeline for American departure without binding conditions on Taliban behaviour. EYRE: In essence, they ceded a lot to the Taliban without getting much in return. And the fact that the Afghan government was not at the table for that. You talked about trust, well, this was another significant breaking of that trust. TREMONTI: President Joe Biden inherited the Doha Agreement. And despite the Taliban violating some of the terms, he honoured it. After the first provincial capital was taken by the Taliban, the Afghan government collapsed in nine days. The chaotic images from Kabul airport were some of the most defining moments of his presidency. And it remains one of the most debated military withdrawals in American history. [Music begins]. MILNER: And now you look at it, I mean, it’s a mess. You know what? It’s a mess, an absolute mess. HABIBI: [Speaking in Pashto] DIN: The situation was very bad after the fall. The first thing that came to my mind that I was in great danger and I wanted to find a way to secure my family and myself. HABIBI: [Continues speaking in Pashto] TREMONTI: That’s next time on The Long War: What led to the fall of Kabul, and what happened after, and how the legacy of war lingers on in the lives of the people who fought there. HILLIARD KAHPEAYSEWAT: I started having, the PTSD, I couldn’t sleep on a bed. I had to go sleep outside on a deck. I used to get these hot flashes. I’d be driving down the road to see a hole at the side of the road. I kind of swerve off almost cause an accident. TREMONTI: The Long War: Canada in Afghanistan was produced by Lisa Gabriele and Neil Morrison. Our associate producer is Hailey Choi. The series was mixed by Cameron McIver. Executive producers from the Canadian War Museum are Jenny Ellison and Steve McCullough. Andrew Burtch is our historian throughout this series. Much thanks to Amal Din for interpreting our interview with Ahmad Habibi. Some of the veterans you heard in this episode were interviewed for the Museum’s oral history project, called In Their Own Voices. To learn more, visit warmuseum.ca or see the links in the show notes. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening. [Music ends].