Kandahar Tour: The Turning Point in Canada's Afghan Mission.

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Lee Windsor, David Charters, and Brent Wilson of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick have written the first examination of Canadian operations in the Kandahar area in 2007. There has already been much published on Operation Medusa in 2006, the Canadians full-scale battles against the Taliban that arguably were decisive in preventing the fall of Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban. This study of what came next looks at the Provincial Reconstruction Team and the battle group as they tried to get aid and development to the people. The authors watched the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment and its Task Force in training in Windsor then spent a month with the soldiers in Afghanistan. They have also had access to war diaries and other documents, and their book is a highly readable and well done study of the bloody reality of the Afghan War.

What will be revelatory to most Canadian readers is the authors’ analysis of the Taliban’s use of propaganda and the shrewd way the enemy plays on Canadian public opinion. The Taliban know that the Canadian public is wobbly on this war, and they deliberately use the deaths of civilians, some of whom they quite consciously expose to coalition fire, to stir up the media. Equally useful is the discussion of post-traumatic stress and how the Canadian Forces are trying to deal with it. This is a quite fascinating and most useful study of Canada’s war in Kandahar.