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-
