IED Monitoring

Canadian troops in Afghanistan have been busily involved in projects to create employment for Afghan locals. "We are having success with those projects and with the civilians there because we employ them, so they turn in a lot of IEDs and provide us with quite good information on the insurgents", according to Lt.-Col. Pelletier. "It gives them a reason to earn money and that is better than working for the insurgents planting IEDs."

Evidently about a thousand Afghans are now busily engaged with make-work projects in the "model villages" in Dand District, close to where the explosion that killed four Canadian soldiers and one Canadian journalist last week. The blast was so ferocious that it upended the 23-ton armoured vehicle they were riding in. "The vehicle flipped completely on its top about 10 metres away from the crater off the road.

"They probably managed to put the [improvised explosive device] under the road by digging a tunnel. It was something that was put in place a few days earlier. It was not a hasty IED, as we call them. It was deliberately planned ahead and took a long time to place... They dug it, they placed it properly. It was all set up." The crews had evidently checked to determine if local Afghans were behaving normally, but detected nothing unusual.

Of course, trying to mount projects that will employ and pay a wage to Afghan civilians is meant to gain their trust, and that gained trust would relate to those same people informing the Canadians of any potential problems, such as the laying of IEDs, and thus save lives. This is what is called a new kind of warfare, winning the hearts and minds of civilians. And it is a fond hope.

There have been reports in the wake of those Canadian deaths, that some locals were well aware of the Taliban IED placement, but felt it politic to mention nothing of this to coalition or Afghan forces. So much for trust and hearts and minds. Civilized people living in democratic countries have little real idea of tribal mentalities, nor of the reality that Afghans have little reason to trust foreigners occupying their soil. The resentment is deep and it is deadly.

The deadly bombing took place just outside Kandahar city's district 2; the patrol on its way to a small village for the purpose of discussing potential local projects to employ locals. Yet those who were in the vicinity of the blast shed no sympathy for the foreigners' loss of lives, but did express their heightened irritation at the NATO helicopters which arrived on the scene, complaining of their fears they would be bombed, held responsible.

They insisted that if the foreigners had paved the road no explosives could have been placed there. They were angered that their farm equipment that had been destroyed from the force of the blast, along with hut walls impacted by it, would now have to be repaired or replaced. None of them knew anything about any Taliban. How utterly, complacently, naive are the foreigners to believe what they wish to believe.

Foreign troops are stationed in that benighted country in an attempt to foil the plans of fundamentalist Islamists, from re-installing themselves as the governing authority and harbouring extremist jihadis slavering for the blood of the foreign enemy - on the enemy's own soil. And in the process 'saving' Afghan women and children from a life of degraded drudgery and institutional abuse.

Little wanting to understand and to finally admit that the Taliban are the Afghans and the Afghans are the Taliban. And there will always be victims, and the victims will always primarily be the women and the children and principally the female children.