Afghanistan

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…

The decision to commit the Canadian Army to southern Afghanistan and the subsequent series of battles west of Kandahar City in the summer and fall of 2006 established a situation whereby the insurgency’s momentum was dissipated by early 2007. By this time the insurgency’s southern leadership in Quetta ascertained that there were two main fronts…

The Canadian Army in Afghanistan was written immediately after the completion of Canadian Army combat operations in Afghanistan in July 2011. The close proximity of this history to the events depicted herein will undoubtedly raise questions relating to the nature of history, objective distance, and the personal involvement of the author in the conflict. My…

  “Eight Battles” was intended to be a compilation of representative operations in southern Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009 with additional commentary based on some of my other writings on Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the production process was an unmitigated disaster partly because the book was pushed through publication without the press providing me with the galley proofs to…

Fighting for Afghanistan is a combat travelogue dealing with my experiences during the extremely dangerous summer of 2006 in southern Afghanistan, as the insurgency ramped up its operations and threatened Kandahar City. I spend the summer of 2006 with Task Force Orion and Combined Task Force Aegis as the OEF coalition struggled to thwart the…

Available HERE Confronting the Chaos was the sequel to Enduring the Freedom. CTC’s focus was on the Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the Strategic Advisory Team, and the efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, not on combat operations. This militated against the book’s reception but I felt at the time, and still do today, that understanding the early reconstruction effort was…

Available from Potomac Books HERE Enduring the Freedom was an experiment in combat travelogue after my first trip to Afghanistan in 2003. I had no idea that I would later be asked to be the Canadian Army’s historian for the war, but my experiences and the Afghans I met in these early days served me…