The grey-uniformed Afghan police, accompanied by Canadian soldiers from the Police Operational Mentor and Liaison Team (POMLT), were working their way on a patrol through the crowded market in Bazaar-e Panjwai. The market, lined with stores selling everything from oranges and pomegranates to colourfully embroidered bicycle seats, runs along both sides of the town’s main road, anchored in the west by the main Canadian and Afghan base, and stretching in the east to the dangerous IED-plagued highway that runs to Kandahar city. As the patrol greeted the shopkeepers and watched the children head down the road to the school, a robed man approached. He suddenly raised his arms, shouted “Allahu akbar!” and pressed a trigger that was attached to his bomb vest. The device refused to detonate as he madly mashed the trigger down again and again. The four Canadians opened fire with their assault rifles while the Afghan police moved the terrified crowd back. Even as the terrorist lay bleeding to death on the ground he was still trying to detonate the bomb. His batteries, it turned out later, were dead. According to one soldier, it was as if the pink Energizer drumming bunny had frozen in place at the end of the commercial.
In 2003, Bazaar-e Panjwai was a dusty ghost town at the dead end of a rotting grey tarmac road. Six years later, it is a booming economic and educational centre at the confluence of the volatile Panjwai and Zharey districts, with brand-new paved highways that connect it to Kandahar city and the vital regional trade route, Highway 1. A dead-end burg no longer, children from distant villages attend the school there. Is it any wonder that the insurgents want to interfere with it through infiltration, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and intimidation? The battle for Bazaar-e Panjwai is on, but it is a battle unlike the larger-scale Operation Medusa back in 2006. Bazaar-e Panjwai is a microcosm of the counter-insurgency fight—and it is a case study of Canadian-Afghan co-operation that is critical to success in Afghanistan. Police are or should be at the forefront of any winning counter-insurgency effort.
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