Free The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan by Graeme Smith Page A

directly at the insurgents: “If they want to die, stay,” he said. “If they don’t want to die, give up.” This prompted a look of discomfort from a Canadian press officer, who immediately tried to soften the message.
    “I would simply add that …” he said.
    “I thought that answered it pretty good,” said the American colonel, with a smile at the journalists. The Afghan press didn’t get the joke, however, because to them the differences among the foreigners were hard to understand. They found it difficult to imagine that English-speaking soldiers who wore similar uniforms, carried the same weapons and fought on the same side would have fundamental disagreements about the war. They saw
all
of us as Americans. (For years, people in Kandahar city would look at me and ask, “Amerika-yeh?” and it was hard to persuade them I was from Canada—and then, to convince them Canada was a real country.) Besides, the Afghan journalists were more interested to know why the international troops had waited so long before deciding to attack the insurgents, who had been a threat near the city for months. A local correspondent from the Associated Press said bluntly, “How come the coalition forces didn’t do anything?”
    It wasn’t only journalists asking that question: Afghan politicians were also worried about their enemies gathering outside the city. One influential member of the provincial council had recently been forced to evacuate more than sixty members of his family from the Panjwai valley, marking the first time in decades of war that his family had been uprooted. Nor was the pressure coming only from local sources: NATO itself seemed to feel its pride was at stake in the fields west of Kandahar city, as the sudden appearance of massed Taliban coincided with NATO forces taking over control of the south from the Americans. There was talk among military officers about the insurgents testing the resolve of the Canadiansand Europeans, and the need for NATO to prove its potency on the battlefield. Military officials described something they called the “weakest link” theory, suggesting that the Taliban was pushing hard against the mixed NATO contingent in the belief that soft liberal democracies would not have the stomach for war. But the threat was also viewed in some circles as a rare opportunity to kill large numbers of Taliban in a single operation: usually preferring guerilla tactics, the insurgents had rarely offered themselves up for a conventional military battle. The prospect excited a generation of military leaders who had spent their lives studying classic manoeuver warfare—but never experiencing it. Like the NATO alliance itself, the soldiers wanted to show their mettle.
    That feeling of urgency may have contributed to NATO’s missteps in the next few days, during the start of an offensive named Operation Medusa. A detailed analysis of the operation, published a year later by the journalist Adam Day in
Legion
magazine, would conclude that foreign troops rushed the initial stage of the fight with “little if any battle procedure, no reconnaissance and intel that was either insufficient or wildly wrong.” The international side of the battle consisted of about fourteen hundred regular troops, mostly Canadian, with smaller contingents of special forces and Afghan soldiers. Estimates of the Taliban ranks were varied, but speculation at the time placed their numbers at roughly half the strength of the foreign troops. The insurgents had tunnelled defensive shelters and anti-tank trenches into the hard earth of the Panjwai valley, and the landscape favoured the defenders, with a warren of irrigation ditches, underground water channels, and vineyards with grapes climbing rows of chest-high troughs in the ground. The mud walls offered unexpectedly good cover: troops were surprised when a blast from their turret cannon, which fires heavy slugs at more than eleven hundred metres per second, failed to punch