The Canadian Army’s odyssey in Kandahar Province continued into 2009 with the hand-over from BGen Denis Thompson to BGen Jon Vance. With crucial strategic issues unresolved at the coalition level and confronted with increasingly disconnected Canadian aims, Joint Task Force Afghanistan took the initiative and forged ahead with an approach developed by the Vance headquarters team during its work up training in the latter half of 2008.
This headquarters contained officers who had experience from the 2006 deployment, personnel who retained personal and professional interest as the situation in Afghanistan evolved in the intervening two years. Equally important was BGen Vance and his team’s receptiveness to advice and commentary from sources that had real (as opposed to theoretical) experience with Afghanistan, and specifically, experience with Kandahar Province and its discontents. These sessions were instrumental in transitioning the concepts developed in June 2008 to a concrete plan by December 2008. Constant observation of events on the ground in January-February 2009 further refined this new approach. In essence, the Vance headquarters hit the ground running and moved rapidly to take advantage of the pre-harvest period to set the conditions for success and generate space so that momentum could be regained in 2009.
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