Posted on 03/12/2008 7:22:23 PM PDT by Clive
Canada to get help in Kandahar: U.S. commander
Marines will help troops, search still on for more NATO troops
KABUL, Afghanistan -- Canada will get the additional NATO combat forces in Kandahar that Parliament is expected to demand if it approves a motion Thursday to extend the mission there to 2011, according to the White House and the U.S. commander of all 50,000 coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Gen. Dan McNeill also told Canwest News Service in an exclusive interview Wednesday that U.S. Marines being deployed to southern Afghanistan in April for seven months, would help the Canadian battle group, fighting the war against the Taliban in the province of Kandahar.
"You should say to the Canadian people that I am not likely to be sitting on my thumbs after the Marines depart," Gen. McNeill said of the deployment of 3,200 Marines to the south that ends this fall. "We will have here a credible force and with some exceptions I am able to move some of it around the battlefield to take care of business where I need to."
In Ottawa, Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier said Wednesday he was personally assured last week by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Washington would do everything in its power to find a partner with 1,000 troops to join Canada in Kandahar province.
"Condoleezza, personally, she is working with us," Mr. Bernier said. "I know she is speaking with other counterparts, other allies, and I am doing that also."
Mr. Bernier's discussion with Mr. Rice came at last week's meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels. Bernier also said he had strong discussions with his British and French counterparts, David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner.
Mr. Bernier said he was not able to say for sure which country would partner with Canada but he remained optimistic that one would be found among its allies in the coming days or weeks.
"Who is going to give us troops? Who is going to be our partner? I don't know that. But I'm optimistic that because it's so important for the credibility of the organization, the credibility of NATO, that in the end we will be able to find a partner with us, a partner that will help us to succeed in the south.
"Because if we don't succeed in the south, we won't be able to succeed in Afghanistan."
Gen. McNeill, referring to what he called "the august Manley panel," which concluded Canada should not continue fighting in Afghanistan unless NATO brought in at least 1,000 other combat troops to work alongside it, as well as better airlift and airborne reconnaissance capabilities, the Vietnam veteran said: "I don't take issue with anything" that it had recommended.
"I will say that if we can keep the force that we have or one that is even a little bit bigger through the end of 2011, it will be most helpful to the security situation here," McNeill said.
Calling Kandahar of "significant importance for the insurgents," he said: "as you might imagine I often think about Kandahar and what I need to do there to make it fairly secure and stable there."
The exact mission of the incoming Marines has been something of a mystery since Washington made the unexpected announcement in mid-January. There was "a high probability that some of the Marines under ISAF control will be involved in tactical operations in Kandahar," Gen. McNeill said. "About the middle or end of April, you will have somewhere between three and four times the number of American shooters in the south than you have today . . . Two thousand of them (will be) under the NATO flag, and 1,200 under the OEF (the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom) flag. In effect, they will all be in support of operations that the Canadian task force is doing there."
In a rare public acknowledgment of the vital secret role that Canada's Joint Task Force commandos have been playing in Afghanistan as part of OEF rather than the NATO force, Gen. McNeill complimented these special forces on "some mighty fine work against insurgent bombers last year." He wondered why the JTF, whose missions in Afghanistan the Canadian military has adamantly refused to comment on, had not received more media attention in Canada.
Gen. McNeill was also full of praise for Canada's top general, Rick Hillier.
"He is a skilled dude isn't he?" he said. "It is more than just speaking to the Canadian people. I doubt there is a person in the Canadian uniform today who has not clearly heard where he wants to go and I doubt you can find anyone in a Canadian uniform who doesn't want to get there with him."
While acknowledging that the Marines would assist the Canadians in Kandahar, he cautioned they also likely would be involved in fighting elsewhere in the south, too, and possibly even in the east of the country where the U.S. army has responsibility.
"I would ask that you be understanding of me when I tell you that I won't play all the cards in my hand," he said, in explaining why he could not divulge more of the Marine's part in his evolving battle plan. "The insurgents read our papers just as closely as we do."
Among the possibilities was to have the Marines support British troops who have been involved in heavy fighting at, what Gen. McNeill called "the door that leads to Kandahar."
Wherever the Marines go in the coming months, the four-star general said he expected they would add a new dimension to the battle.
"They are bringing a number of the things that I have said clearly and consistently that NATO has failed to resource here -- numbers of soldiers, flying machines and intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance platforms."
After revealing that he had become a close reader of Canadian media reports, Gen. McNeill said he took strong exception to some media assessments in Canada that the war in Afghanistan had become a "mission impossible."
"I believe that those who utter such things have not considered the facts," he said.
After Operation Medusa, which was undertaken by battle groups led by the Princess Patricias Canadian Light Infantry and the Royal Canadian Regiment during the summer and fall of 2006 "the media was replete with (stories of) Taliban being resurgent and coming back," McNeill said. "But it looks like that didn't happen. It looks like the force to recognize on the battlefield last year was NATO and its Afghan allies and the brothers from OEF . . .
"The only thing they (the Taliban) accomplished in 2007 was to stay in the newspapers (through IED attacks and suicide bombings). They did not accomplish that much on the battlefield."
One of the reasons Gen. McNeill felt progress had been made since he took command about one year ago was the growing number of IEDs -- the cause of most Canadian and NATO casualties in Afghanistan -- being discovered.
"The numbers that we have detected before they explode . . . seems to be running ahead of the number of explosives," he said, referring to statistics for this year. "That is an indicator to us that our forces are responding on the battlefield in the right way."
Another positive was that coalition forces had "had much success in disrupting (the Taliban's) command and control and it resulted in killing a lot of (their) low- to mid- and high-level leadership and that has had an effect on the battlefield in the south and the east. There has been some of that in Kandahar and there will be a few more of it in Kandahar. I will make that prediction."
An area were there had been "some dramatic improvements in past year" had been in the east of the country, Gen. McNeill said. This had been achieved by doubling the number of U.S. troops there and by "generous" discretionary funds the U.S. Congress had allocated for American commanders to spend, he said.
Although much attention had been given to differences between some NATO countries over how to prosecute the war and where to send combat forces, Gen. McNeill said what had been lost in this debate was "there have been a lot of parliamentary actions to extend mandates here. The most notable one was in Germany where you had a lot of public opinion against it, yet two overwhelming votes in the Bundestag to extend the mandate. The only ones who have left were the Koreans who left shortly after their hostage crisis. But the Koreans are back this spring to run a PRT (provincial reconstruction team)."
With files from Ottawa Citizen
Guess that means we’re staying.
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But we need the Chinooks and UAVs also required by the Manley report.
Bttt
Yeah. We still love you guys. We have our problems in Congress, as well.
Where ever Marine trigger pullers go, there goes too a very well tried and tested expeditionary logistics support system as well as dedicated air/ground attack platforms.
Our Canadian brothers will have access what they need.
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