Live (sort of) from CFB Gagetown in Oromocto, N.B., it’s the first night of the 15th Annual Canadian International Sniper Concentration and some of the most
It was a heat-crazed Afghan afternoon in 2008 when I think maybe I saw through the war.
Zangabad is a bad memory, nothing but streaks of confusion and discontent. That day in April the village was mostly deserted, just a labyrinth of tawny mud walls, a few shifty farmers and a disaster of IEDs.
I was on patrol with the infantry. Their mission was to provide security for the construction of a new road passing through Haji and Zangabad all the way out to Mushan. The road was scheduled to bring peace and prosperity to western Panjwaii, the most hostile part of the most hostile district in Kandahar province, if not the country.
Their mission was not going well. The road was constantly being laced with IEDs. Canadians and Afghans were dying and the whole project was in jeopardy.
On Sept. 1, in the first ever CDNMILBLOG (Canadian Military Blog) posting, I fear I might have written something misleading. I said the combat mission
While there are still more than 1,000 Canadian Forces members currently in Kandahar working to pack up and ship home five years worth of war-fighting
Darts is an infuriating game. What should be simple—throwing a steel-tipped projectile 2.37 metres into a cork target—is at times intricately, impossibly complex. Simply making
Over nearly five years of combat in Kandahar province, the Canadian Forces mission to defeat the insurgent Taliban has been called many things—‘the unexpected war,’ ‘the difficult war,’ ‘mission impossible’—but in the end it will be up to the historians, and history itself, to decide what it all meant. In the meantime, certain things are known: The counter-insurgency campaign waged in Kandahar province from 2006-2011 was the Canadian military’s first period of sustained combat in more than 50 years, since the Korean war. If nothing else, it was a test of military, political and democratic resolve. The effort to combat islamic militancy and international terrorism, borne out of the attacks of September 11, 2001, drew Canada and its military into some harrowing situations. The cost was high. What follows is a timeline of the mission’s Milestones.
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