ShareThisBy GRAEME SMITH
Sitting on the rooftop of a shrapnel-scarred building in southern Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Omer Lavoie squinted into the sunset and looked over the swath of farmland that his soldiers had conquered.
About 10 days earlier, the commander of Canada's battle group was staring down hundreds of Taliban fighters in those fields. His command post was filled with urgent bursts of radio traffic.
But the Taliban appear to have run away, after enduring heavy attacks from the air and a steady Canadian advance on the ground, and the operation has slowed into a methodical mop-up. One officer compared Tuesday's mood around the command post to a schoolyard in June.
On his metal folding chair, Lavoie allowed himself a moment of quiet reflection. But the 40-year-old commander couldn't entirely relax while many of his troops were still pushing south, across this former Taliban stronghold about 10 miles southwest of Kandahar city. The steady drive from the north won't stop, Lavoie said, until his soldiers meet their counterparts waiting for them on the southern edge of the battlefield, near the Arghandab River.
"When I'm having lunch on the Arghandab, then I'll heave a sigh of relief," he said.
A NATO statement confirmed Tuesday that most of the journey is already finished; about 65 percent of the contested area has been formally cleared of insurgents. The only Canadian injury Tuesday happened in a vehicle accident.
While still unwilling to declare victory, the Canadian commander was already musing about the lessons of the battle.
"If you'd asked me five months ago, 'Do you need tanks to fight insurgents?,' I would have said, 'No, you're nuts,' " he said. "But ... the tactics they've now transitioned to, very seldom do insurgents mass and concentrate the way they've done here and dig their feet into a stronghold. From my perspective, they're acting more like a conventional enemy."
Canada will send 15 Leopard tanks to Afghanistan, the Globe and Mail has reported, although this hasn't yet been confirmed by the military. Some military planners had considered the tanks obsolete, assuming the fight against insurgents in places such as Afghanistan would require nimble infantry.
But the boldness of the insurgents has forced a re-evaluation of the need for heavy war-fighting equipment, Lavoie said.
"Because they're acting conventionally, then conventional assets like tanks, armored engineering vehicles and armored bridge-laying vehicles certainly have their place here," he said. "The lesson learned is that you need to maintain those capabilities."
He continued: "If you're truly going to operate on the full spectrum of conflict, you've got to put your money where your mouth is. You need things that can operate on the far end, which are combat enablers like tanks, artillery and close-air support."
Casualties are difficult to estimate, he said, but the operation appears to have killed 230 to 300 insurgents _ a number lower than NATO totals, but higher than the figure admitted by the Taliban.
"The numbers that came at us surprised me," he said. "I'd say their tenacity surprised me as well, to be honest. I wouldn't be honest if I said it didn't."
Despite the fact that many insurgents escaped, he added, the showdown between Canadians and Taliban will probably improve the prestige of the foreign troops.
"Any misperception the insurgent forces may have had, that NATO didn't have the capacity to go in hard, well, I'm sure there's no doubt in their mind now," he said. "I'm not sure they've ever seen, under any previous coalition, this amount of pressure."
Lavoie said he's hopeful that the insurgents won't repeat such large-scale escalations.
"They'll have no choice," he said. "We had the combat power to break them. The remnants will have no choice but to go back to operating in a typical insurgent, two- to 10-man sort of insurgent sections.
"My mission statement still says, 'Task Force 76 battle group will conduct counterinsurgency operations in the province of Kandahar.' That mission statement still stands, because after this is done we'll go back to conducting those operations."
