MOSCOW ? The community of Belanday, where a rogue American army sergeant reportedly began a murderous spree Sunday, killing 16 Afghans including several little girls, was one of Canada?s model villages in Kandahar where Canadian and later American troops lived in small groups in proximity to the local population and invested tens of thousands of hours between 2009 and 2011 to win their confidence.
?If it happened there, this will be shocking to the people of Belanday, as you can imagine, but I think that they can recover. One bad actor cannot spoil the reputation of the whole. I believe that to be true,? said Maj.-Gen. Jon Vance, whose idea it was three years ago to create model villages where troops interacted closely with the locals.
The community was chosen as a model village by Vance in the fall of 2009 as part of a project that had begun nearby in April 2009. It was copied across southern Afghanistan after NATO?s top Afghan generals, Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus saw firsthand what Canada had achieved there.
Reports from the scene were confusing and contradictory Sunday with some indicating the shooting by a lone U.S. soldier had begun in Belanday before spreading to two other villages to the north in Panjwaii District. The entire region was part of Canada?s area of military operations until the Harper government withdrew its combat forces last summer. It lies in the middle of a hardscrabble desert about 20 kilometres from Kandahar City.
?It was an interesting place,? Vance, who commanded Canadian combat forces in Afghanistan in 2009 and again for five months in 2010, recalled in an interview on Sunday. ?It was a definite transit point for Taliban on their way to Kandahar City.
?We went there with two objectives. We no longer wanted it to be a transit point for the enemy and we wanted to directly engage the local population.?
The arc to the west and southwest of Kandahar City that Canadian troops first entered in the spring of 2006 was one of the most dangerous in southern Afghanistan until Canadian forces, with U.S. assistance, began to have sufficient forces to establish model villages there in 2009.
When I was in the area several times last year where Sunday?s shootings occurred, I witnessed Canadian and American soldiers going on long joint foot patrols, patiently making friends with local children in the narrow warren of streets. Through such encounters International Security Assistance Force troops got to know their parents, or, at least, their fathers a bit. It was an approach which eventually paid big dividends but that may be reversed after Sunday?s tragic event.
?By the time all Canadian forces had left it was quiet because it had become a toxic environment for the Taliban,? Vance said.
?Things had changed incredibly for the good there,? said Howard Coombs, a retired infantry officer who was a civilian adviser to Canada?s last combat force in Kandahar. ?The folks had us into tea and were very friendly and accommodating. Jon?s (Vance) model village concept spread down south and did that. We were reaping the benefits of the village program. The violence had diminished so much you could not begin to compare it with what had happened in the past.?
?The only complaint I ever head concerned water. There was a feeling that some water had been released to the benefit of another village.?
Canada has about 910 military advisers still in Afghanistan. None are in Kandahar, however three civilians who are part of Foreign Affairs still work out of a U.S. base in the province.
Canadian advisers are mostly based in Kabul although a few are in the western cities of Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif. They are expected to remain there until the spring of 2014, although their numbers are likely to diminish beginning this fall as NATO reassesses the number of such trainers it requires in Afghanistan.
Vance was unable to speak on Sunday to what had happened in Kandahar because he had received no information and because the matter was now being looked into by ISAF in Afghanistan.
?It is going to be investigated,? Vance said at the Ottawa airport before boarding a flight. ?But something to remember is that when ISAF is found to have done wrong, it apologizes. The Taliban doesn?t.?
?I was shocked and saddened to hear of the shooting incident today in Kandahar Province,? U.S. Marine Gen. John R. Allen, commander of ISAF Forces, said in a statement Sunday. ?I offer my profound regret and deepest condolences to the victims and their families. I pledge to all the noble people of Afghanistan my commitment to a rapid and thorough investigation.?
?I fully support Gen. Allen?s commitment to establish the facts and hold anyone responsible to account,? NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Sunday. ?We remain firmly committed to our mission of building a strong and stable Afghanistan, together with our Afghan partners.?
Defence Minister Peter MacKay said in a statement the killing of the civilians was ?deplorable and runs contrary to everything that the international mission aims to accomplish.?
The incident follows by only a few weeks the burning of several Holy Qur?ans by U.S. troops at an airbase near Kabul. That incident triggered days of outrage and violence that resulted in about 30 Afghan deaths and the murder of six U.S. advisers whose Afghan colleagues turned their weapons on them.
In a separate incident this weekend, there were reports that a U.S. helicopter had inadvertently fired at and killed several Afghan civilians in an attack that had gone awry.
? Copyright (c) Postmedia News
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