Canadians winding down Afghan tour
As Canada ramps up its military response to Islamic State, there are still seven Canadian officers serving in Afghanistan 38 months after the Canadian Forces ended its combat mission in Kandahar and five months after its military training mission closed in Kabul.
The de facto leader of the small group of Canadians, because of his rank, is Brig.-Gen. Simon Hetherington. He arrived in Afghanistan in July because he is the deputy commander (operations) of the U.S. army’s XVIII Airborne Corps, which was sent by the Pentagon to oversee many of the 35,000 NATO troops still in Afghanistan. The alliance is shrinking its footprint to 12,500 by next year, down from 140,000 in 2012.
By the time Hetherington leaves Afghanistan in December, he will have spent more time “incountry” than any other senior Canadian officer. The general was deputy commander of Canada’s Task Force Kandahar in late 2009 during disgraced Van Doo Brig.-Gen. Daniel Menard’s starcrossed tour as the leader of the group. Four years before that he ran Canada’s provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar City.
“To be completely honest, I didn’t know I would be deploying,” Hetherington said the other day in an exclusive interview from Kabul where the XVIII Airborne Corps is spending a year. “It certainly isn’t well known. When family and friends hear where I am, they say that they thought we had taken the flag down. There was an application with the government, and they said go.”
As a matter of government policy, a Canadian exchange officer “serves at the pleasure of the army we serve with, so when (Brig.-Gen. Wayne Eyre) finished his six months here, I started my six months,” said Hetherington, who leads NATO’s Afghan training mission.
Hetherington attended the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and was commander of 2nd Mechanized Brigade at CFB Petawawa between his first two Afghan assignments. He also worked briefly with now retired Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie’s Canadian Forces Transformation Team, which recommended ways to cut military costs.
Being back in Afghanistan for a third tour has brought home to the artillery officer how highly regarded the Canadians were by their Afghan counterparts.
“We add a Canadian flavour to the organization and the Afghans look at us fondly,” he said. In particular, Afghans remember then-Brig.-Gen. Dean Milner as “a larger than life dude,” who led the NATO training and advisory mission in Kabul until he returned to Canada in the spring.
“Having been here gives you credibility,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of old friends who were with us in places such as Arghandab. The Afghans remember us. I’ve met some from previous tours.”
Hetherington was highly regarded by the troops who served with him in Afghanistan and Canada because of his affability and leadership. He now leads the same training mission as Milner and four other Canadian generals before him. It has built the Afghan army into a force of 350,000 soldiers and 309 kandaks (battalions) today, and works as an adviser at an institutional level with the Afghan military leadership.
“It is fully manned up. It is a well equipped mobile strike force,” Hetherington said of the Afghan forces. “I would not have believed this in 2010, let alone in 2006.”
One of the difficulties lately has been the Afghans’ inability to chose a new leader to succeed outgoing President Hamid Karzai. That problem may have been resolved on the weekend with an agreement between the two leading candidates, but “election uncertainty hurt momentum,” he said.
With NATO now on “the downward slope” in Afghanistan, “the greatest concern for us as the U.S. withdraws the enablers it provided is how the Afghans will do air medevac, close air support and reconnaissance because they are not mature capabilities in the ANSF (Afghan National Security Forces). But there are ways to mitigate it. We are providing equipment to address gaps in close air support, mortars. We are working to help its air force with a medevac capability and to provide platforms for air/ground skills, terminal air traffic controllers and air liaison officers.”
Hetherington spent one month working alongside Maj.-Gen. Harold Greene before the American training adviser was murdered by a suspected Afghan in early August.
“It is very sad. He was a true gentleman,” Hetherington said. “He looked like an accountant but he was a war winner. He got things done. He had to get capabilities out to the field and knew how to work the system. That is what he was doing, addressing infrastructure, the day he died.”
Hetherington is out and about himself about four times a week. He has been to the north and east of Afghanistan and is looking forward to his first trip back to Kandahar.
“It won’t be as robust as ... when we went out mounted in LAVs (light armoured vehicles),” he said. “Mostly I visit big bases, but I will do some advising at KAF (Kandahar Airfield).”
Asked for an assessment of the security threat from the Taliban, he said: “The delta (for violence) is down. That is kind of encouraging. That is the message I want to bring to our colleagues who served out here.
“Afghans still take casualties, but IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are nowhere near the level when we had to stand and watch those ramp ceremonies in Kandahar.”
Hetherington returns to his duties with the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in mid-December. The other six Canadians were serving in Helmand and Kandahar as well as Kabul. However, “by the end of the year the number of Canadians here will probably be zero,” he said, closing the last chapter in a military history that began 13 years ago.