Canadian military trainers expected home in weeks
100 sea containers of army equipment remain stranded at Kandahar Airfield
All but about 100 of the 600 Canadian military trainers still in Afghanistan will be out of the country within weeks and the rest will be gone by mid-March, beating by several weeks a deadline imposed by the federal government nearly three years ago.
However, it is proving a lot tougher for the Canadian Forces to remove some of the staggering amount of military gear that it accumulated in Afghanistan as close to 40,000 troops rotated through there over the past 12 years.
About 100 sea containers containing hundreds of thousands of kilograms of kit from Canada’s combat mission in southern Afghanistan — which ended nearly 30 months ago — remain stuck at Kandahar Airfield, according to Lt.-Gen. Stu Beare, who leads Canadian Joint Operations Command and is responsible for Canada’s military deployments worldwide.
“Roughly one-half of the 220 sea cans that were blocked by virtue of the ground lines being blocked by Pakistan, are still there,” Beare said during a recent flight from Kabul to Kuwait City, after visiting Canadian troops and Afghan and NATO officials in the Afghan capital.
The equipment was marooned for months on the Afghan side of the border because Pakistan refused to let it pass through on its way to the port of Karachi because of a dispute with the U.S. and NATO over drone attacks on targets inside that country as well as other issues that had nothing to do with Canada.
“When it became clear the ground lines were never going to open, we recovered them to Kandahar Airfield,” Beare said. “We sent in a team to re-inspect the containers.
“Given the time and cost associated with some of the materiel, we did some disposals. We re-certified the containers for shipment. For many weeks now the containers have been flowing out through a NATO-co-ordinated, contracted air system.”
The contractor, which provides supplies for NATO’s ongoing operations at Kandahar Airfield, is using its relatively empty return flights from there to the Middle East to transport the Canadian sea cans to an airfield in the Gulf. The containers are ferried from there to a nearby port where they are to be loaded on freighters bound for Montreal. When it arrives there the cargo is to be dispersed to military bases across the country.
The 600 Canadians still on the ground in Afghanistan today are part of NATO’s mostly Kabul-based training mission. Commanded by Canadian Maj.-Gen. Dean Milner, this NATO unit prepares Afghan soldiers and police for combat operations and other duties.
‘When it became clear the ground lines were never going to open, we recovered them to Kandahar Airfield.’
LT.-GEN. STU BEARE Head of Joint Operations Command
Several hundred of those Canadians will be back home in time for Christmas, with hundreds more scheduled to depart from Kabul in January. That will only leave 100 or so Canadians in Afghanistan for the last couple of months of the mission.
“Our intention is the effective termination of all our functions by mid-March,” Beare said. “That allows the troops and the support team in Kuwait to all be home before the end of March,” he said, praising the small Canadian military team in Kuwait and their “amazing and supportive” Kuwaiti hosts.
The military equipment still in Kandahar does not include weapons or ammunition, the general said.
“It is not serialized equipment,” he said. “It is major assemblies, spare parts, things that are of value but not so valuable that they were (worth) the cost of flying them all the way home. They are things that we need but did not need immediately.”
All the containers still in Kandahar will finally be out of Afghanistan by early in the new year, Beare said. No delay is expected in getting the much smaller amount of Canadian gear out of Kabul before the Canadian flag is lowered there for the last time in about 15 weeks.
During Canada’s years in Afghanistan 158 soldiers were killed there.
The mission began with a small combat deployment to Kandahar in early 2002, switched to a larger, mostly peacekeeping role in Kabul from 2003 to 2005 and returned to Kandahar with a large task force for combat operations between 2006 and 2011 when the Canadians transitioned to a training role mostly in Kabul but also in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.