Most Canadian troops home from Afghanistan within weeks but some equipment is still stuck in Kandahar
Matthew Fisher
Ottawa Citizen
29 Nov 2013
All but about 100 of the 600 Canadian military trainers still in Afghanistan will be out of the country within weeks and the rest will be gone by mid-March, beating by several weeks a deadline imposed by the federal government nearly three years ago.
However, it is proving a lot tougher for the Canadian Forces to remove some of the staggering amount of military gear that it accumulated in Afghanistan as close to 40,000 troops rotated through there over the past 12 years.
About 100 sea containers containing hundreds of thousands of kilograms of kit from Canada’s combat mission in southern Afghanistan – which ended nearly 30 months ago – remain stuck at Kandahar Airfield, according to Lt.-Gen. Stu Beare, who leads Canadian Joint Operations Command and is responsible for Canada’s military deployments worldwide.
“Roughly one half of the 220 sea cans that were blocked by virtue of the ground lines being blocked by Pakistan, are still there,” Beare said during a recent flight from Kabul to Kuwait City, after visiting Canadian troops and Afghan and NATO officials in the Afghan capital.
The equipment was marooned for months on the Afghan side of the border because Pakistan refused to let it pass through on its way to the port of Karachi because of a dispute with the U.S. and NATO over drone attacks on targets inside that country as well as other issues that had nothing to do with Canada.
“When it became clear the ground lines were never going to open, we recovered them to Kandahar Airfield,” Beare said. “We sent in a team to re-inspect the containers.
“Given the time and cost associated with some of the materiel, we did some disposals. We re-certified the containers for shipment. For many weeks now the containers have been flowing out through a NATO-co-ordinated, contracted air system.”
The contractor, which provides supplies for NATO’s ongoing operations at Kandahar Airfield, is using its relatively empty return flights from there to the Middle East to transport the Canadian sea cans to an airfield in the Gulf. The containers are ferried from there to a nearby port where they are to be loaded on freighters bound for Montreal. When it arrives there the cargo is to be dispersed to military bases across the country.
The 600 Canadians still on the ground in Afghanistan today are part of NATO’s mostly Kabul-based training mission. Commanded by Canadian Maj.-Gen. Dean Milner, this NATO unit prepares Afghan soldiers and police for combat operations and other duties.
Several hundred of those Canadians will be back home in time for Christmas, with hundreds more scheduled to depart from Kabul in January. That will only leave 100 or so Canadians in Afghanistan for the last couple of months of the mission.
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