In September 2005, Bill Graham, who was then defence minister in Paul Martin's Liberal government, told me over tea in Moscow that what the Canadian Forces were about to start in Kandahar was different from what Canada had done so far. Kandahar, he said bluntly, would be "a combat mission, and we have made our decision knowing that."
Graham's candid remarks -in a country with its own complicated military history in Afghanistan -and similarly direct descriptions about the looming combat mission by Gen. Rick Hillier, who was then Canada's top soldier, drew almost no political or media attention at home.
So, as the military and the government prepared for war in southern Afghanistan, the Canadian public was largely unaware of what the country had gotten itself into.
Nearly six years, $1.6 billion in development and humanitarian aid, as much as $10 billion in direct and indirect military expenditures and more than 150 military deaths later, Canadians have heard more than they may ever have wanted to about a country most of them had never thought of before Sept. 11, 2001.
Along the way, many have become pessimistic and negative about the Afghan war. And although the battlefield reality has improved immensely since the war's bloodiest days, perceptions lag and opposition to Canada's presence there continues as the operation transitions this summer from the killing fields of Kandahar to a smaller, less dangerous training mission in northern Afghanistan.
Many Canadians think of Afghanistan as Prime Minister Stephen Harper's war.
But it didn't start out that way.
Canada's involvement in South Asia began on former prime minister Jean Chretien's watch. It was Chretien who dispatched a half-dozen Canadian warships from Nova Scotia and British Columbia to look for al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists fleeing Afghanistan via Pakistan immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Not long after, he sent a battle group of about 1,000 soldiers to Kandahar. They were led by Lt.-Col. Pat Stogran's battalion from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. For six months, they hunted for Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and Taliban in mountains near the Pakistan border.
Once the Patricias got home, Chretien again volunteered Canada to head a multinational brigade. For this, some 2,000 Canadian troops were based on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, from 2003 to 2005.
After much debate, Chretien's successor, Paul Martin, subsequently decided that Canada should open a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) base in the Taliban heartland of Kandahar city.
A modest initial deployment in November 2005 was followed a few months later by about 2,000 (later more than 3,000) infantry, artillery, engineers, armoured and support troops.
The daunting second assignment was to lead an openended new combat mission across a province notoriously regarded as the most dangerous in the country.
Even the infamous Afghan detainee scandal arose from rules drawn up by the Liberal government. Only after Harper's team inherited Canada's UNsanctioned shooting war were detainee procedures tightened.
Canada's first long-term combat undertaking in more than half a century started in March 2006, with a string of bloody battlefield successes in Taliban strongholds west of Kandahar city by a battalion of Patricias and replacements from the Royal Canadian Regiment.
It was during firefights that spring, summer and fall that the Taliban learned at great cost not to confront the Canadians head-on with anything like conventional forces.
In the deliberate absence of an official tally, estimates of the enemy dead during what was eventually called Operation Medusa reached from the high hundreds to well more than 1,000.
"It was a remarkable strategic victory at the tactical level in terms of telling the Afghan people and government that we are with you," said Michel Gauthier, a retired three-star general who was responsible for all Canadian Forces overseas at the time.
"But that was by no stretch of the imagination the whole story."
After licking their wounds in Pakistan safe havens, the Taliban began "Round 2," returning to Kandahar as an insurgency. They adopted ruthless, unconventional terrorist tactics by unleashing suicide bombers and planting thousands of homemade bombs that made travelling anywhere by road or on foot a terrifying experience.
This campaign produced a violent stalemate. From 2007 through 2008, while responsible for an area the size of New Brunswick, the small Canadian force had to concentrate on stopping the Taliban from taking Kandahar city, the insurgency's most cherished prize.
"As early as the fall of 2006 we realized that there was a mismatch," said Gauthier. "There were not enough NATO troops to succeed if success was about establishing a secure environment while building Afghan capacity. That Kandahar city did not fall was a victory for Canada."
Responding to growing political pressure to avoid what looked like an impending debacle, Harper appointed a blue-ribbon panel to make recommendations. The group was chaired by former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley, and included former broadcaster Pamela Wallin, former Conservative minister Jake Epp, former ambassador to Washington Derek Burney, and Paul Tellier, former clerk of the Privy Council.
In January 2008, after touring Afghanistan and meeting with military and civilian experts and ordinary Canadians at home, the panel reported to Parliament that the troops urgently needed helicopters, far more capable surveillance drones and additional NATO forces if there was to be any chance to finally turn the conflict in Kandahar in the coalition's favour.
As a result, Heron drones were purchased from Israel, Canadian Griffon helicopters were equipped with armour and Gatling guns, CH47 Chinook helicopters were procured from the U.S. army and pilot training was started at Fort Rucker, Ala. Canada also got an undertaking from Washington that the Americans would send an army battalion to Zhari district.
Manley, now president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, declined to be interviewed about his pivotal role.
But when the definitive history of Canada's involvement in the Afghan conflict is finally written, Manley will be one of two people seen as having saved a failing venture by finally getting the resources needed to push the Taliban off vital ground to the west of Kandahar city. The other saviour is Brig.-Gen. Jon Vance, who served two tours as Canada's top warrior here.
"The most important thing we did was to get airlift," said Wallin, a member of Manley's panel who recently chaired the Senate's national security and defence committee. "When we had to be on those roads and we had to ask the Americans to send their Black Hawks (helicopters), when they were not too busy, to move our VIPs and our troops . . .
"If a country cannot provide for its own defence, one wonders why it would commit to such an objective," Wallin said.
"We all pretty much agreed that if we did not have airlift, we were going to continue to sustain casualties and that was going to break a lot of hearts and hurt a lot of families and undermine the mission. You can't ask young men and women to go to war with two tin cans and some string."
Almost as important, the senator from Saskatchewan said, was that the Manley Panel got Canadians involved in the Afghan decision-making process. "It actually engaged the public," she said.
The Manley Panel brought "the real challenges to life," said Gauthier, the former CEFCOM commander.
"And, at a political level, the fact that Mr. Manley and his team were able to bring forward recommendations, that Parliament agreed to, allowed Canada's contribution to continue for another three years -(that) was one of the most important things that it did."
By getting Washington to send a U.S. army battalion to Kandahar at a time when most of its political focus and its forces were still heavily engaged in Iraq, "the Manley Panel got us in a position where the Americans were actually getting a full-time look at the problem," said Brig.-Gen. Denis Thompson, who was Task Force Kandahar's commander in 2008 when the first reinforcements began to trickle in.
"It's all about troop density. When I arrived the ratio of security forces to the population was 6.8 for every 1,000 of the population. By the time we left that number was closer to 9.5."
But Thompson, who now oversees Canada's special forces, noted that a ratio of 20 or 25 security personnel for every 1,000 residents was needed.
Thanks to a modest U.S. surge of forces and the arrival of large numbers of newly recruited Afghan troops in 2009, Jon Vance was the first Canadian general to finally have enough manpower to introduce classic counter-insurgency tactics.
The blunt, charismatic Vance set his troops the task of clearing, holding and developing the village of Deh-e-Bagh. Within months of Canadian troops moving in alongside Afghan forces there and in surrounding villages, schools and clinics began to open and enemy attacks fell to almost zero.
Visitors such as NATO's former Afghan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, his boss Gen. David Petraeus and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen came calling. The VIPs were so impressed by what they saw that they declared Vance's accomplishment the template for alliance operations across the country.
