Laughter, outrage and a call to battle

Canadians find their way amid the noise of what may be the craziest little battleground on the planet, CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD writes

Christie Blatchford, Globe & Mail, 19 Dec 06

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PANJWAI, AFGHANISTAN -- It is perhaps the craziest little battleground on the planet.

In one corner of it yesterday, Canadian Sergeant Nathan Ronaldson sat cross-legged on a carpet for almost three hours with about 15 grape-growers engaged in the insane negotiations that are the norm in this country -- all theatre, with the actors variously feigning outrage and storming out of the joint, then making jokes and roaring with laughter.

At one point in the series of such meetings, which have stretched over at least a month and show no sign of coming to a halt, Sgt. Ronaldson, a dimpled reservist with the 48th Highlanders in Toronto, actually had his Afghan interpreter carefully translate "greedy prick" into Pashto.

Yesterday, Sgt. Ronaldson was content merely to tell the farmers, who are seeking (and getting, though not as much as they want) compensation from the Canadians for grape vines that were destroyed during the building of a security road, "You let your wallets control your heads." Haji Agha Lalai, a local leader, acidly replied with a brief harangue on the importance of land to Afghans such that there is an ironic saying here that the man who sells his property "has sold his father's bones."

"If you asked me if that was a success," Sgt. Ronaldson, an emergency room nurse by training, said with a wry grin afterward, "I'd say yes. If you asked me what happened, I'd say absolutely nothing."

In another corner, just one small hill and less than a dusty kilometre away, the soldiers of 1st Battalion, the Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group, were "getting ready to launch back on operations and back to do the business," as Lieutenant-Colonel Omer Lavoie put it at a promotion ceremony, and join other NATO forces in Operation Baaz Tsuka -- in English, Falcon's Summit.

That operation, still somewhat cloaked in secrecy, started last weekend with a leaflet drop aimed at persuading part-time Taliban to lay down their bombs and arms and is optimistically intended to be what the military calls a "less kinetic" mission -- that is, with less fighting.

Thus far, to judge both by the minimal information released yesterday by NATO and by unconfirmed reports from a local source considered reliable, the operation appears to be heading in the right direction.

The source said that NATO and Afghan National Army forces moved almost 10 kilometres southwest yesterday, as far as Kosh Tak, and that women and children were seen leaving the tiny villages in cars and on motorcycles -- the usual indicator of the Taliban preparing to do battle, and that although there was some fighting, the bulk of the insurgents instead made a tactical retreat to a nearby stronghold.

In addition, the source said, nine Taliban commanders meeting two nights ago in a keshmeshkhanu, or grape-drying hut, were killed in a NATO air strike. The report, which couldn't be confirmed, said that four of the Taliban leaders were senior commanders.

Thus, in one corner of the battleground, reports of actual warfare; in another, meetings alternately jovial and tense but with all the principals knowing their roles and playing them as diligently as actors; in yet another, the soldiers of the infantry purring in the warm winter sun and waiting, with that mix of dread and anticipation which only the combat-hardened know, the call to battle -- or as Private Daniel Rosati, a 27-year-old Light Armoured Vehicle gunner from Woodbridge, Ont., who has seen plenty of action, put it, "Part of you wants it, part of you doesn't."

And over this one small slice of the volatile south that is Canada's area of operations, up and down the gorgeous Arghandab River valley and in the small mud-walled villages dotted throughout it, were the clashing noises that make up the soundtrack of modern Afghanistan -- choppers circling in the air over forward operating bases as the muezzin attempts to call the faithful to prayer, the groans of construction vehicles involved in the building of the new road vying with the occasional boom of test fires or flares that briefly light up the black night skies, the roar of planes over the omnipresent crunch of boots on the gravel that covers the ground of the makeshift bases.

Playing what could be a vital role in Operation Baaz Tsuka is the newest, smallest and least well known of Afghan security forces, the fledgling Afghan National Auxiliary Police, or ANAP.

The brainchild of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and thus grounded in hard-nosed local pragmatism, the ANAP is the honey in what NATO hopes is its trap -- a practical way of legitimizing and taking advantage of the violent Afghan culture, recently honed to a sharp edge in more than three decades of war, insurgency and occupation but centuries old for all that, of being armed to the teeth and protecting what's yours.

The ANAP, as Canadian Brigadier-General Tim Grant told reporters yesterday, is part of NATO's effort to persuade local elders to "take responsibility for their own security." Ideally, what these young men, armed as they likely would be in any case but trained to a veneer of professionalism by Canadian Military Police for two weeks, will do is help villagers give hard-line Taliban the boot and keep them at bay.

"Canada is very intimately involved in training them," Brig.-Gen. Grant said. "We're trying to encourage village elders to have their sons enroll in the ANAP." The hope is that the young auxiliary policemen could be involved in protecting their villages, and would be less susceptible to recruitment from the Taliban.

Mr. Karzai spoke to 100 Panjwai elders last week, Brig.-Gen. Grant said, encouraging them to encourage their young men to join the ANAP. The elders were receptive, he said, if for no other reason than the people of the area are weary of fighting and tired of bunking in with friends and relatives or at the displaced persons camps that have recently sprung up during the fighting that has gone on here since July. The first ANAP classes graduated just last month.

But if all is relatively calm thus far, as Brig.-Gen. Grant reminded his listeners yesterday, "Only time will tell. The enemy has a vote in all of this."

And the enemy is smart and vicious: The Globe and Mail's local source reported that the Taliban yesterday hanged an alleged spy from a tree. As Master Corporal Max Smith, the RCR's own unofficial soldier poet, wrote in Fallen Comrades, "In the face of an enemy that is more like a ghost. But in this place, they are the host."