“Delta Couldn’t Have Done This” — What A US Navy Captain Said About JTF2 Operators in Kandahar
Six Canadians were sitting in the back of a Chinook helicopter somewhere over Pakistani airspace at 2:00 in the morning watching the fuel gauge tick toward empty. They’d just finished their first mission of the war. The cargo on the floor between their boots was a single computer hard drive pulled out of an al-Qaeda compound an hour earlier.
The pilot’s voice came over the headset. 2 minutes of fuel left, then 1 minute. Then he stopped giving numbers. They landed in the dark on the wrong side of a border in a country that had not officially given them permission to be there carrying intelligence that nobody back home in Ottawa knew they’d gone to get.
And that was the easy part of their deployment. Now, here is the part that does not make sense yet. There were 40 of them total. In a coalition of 1,300 operators, 40 Canadians in a country their own prime minister had not authorized them to enter working under an American Navy captain who would say something about them 6 months later that nobody in Canada was supposed to hear.
There is a tarmac photograph that will end a defense minister’s career. There is a compound full of 36 fighters who surrendered to 24 men without a shot fired. And there is one sentence spoken by the American commander that we are going to get to in exactly 11 minutes. Stay with this because everything you think you know about who America trusted for the dangerous work in the first 6 months of Afghanistan is about to be reorganized by a country with a population smaller than California.
The unit was called Joint Task Force 2, JTF2. Canadians say it the same way Americans say Delta, quietly and only when they have to. It had been created on the 1st of April 1993 at a former Mountie training facility called Dwyer Hill, about 30 km southwest of Ottawa. The motto written on the gate read >> [music] >> facta non verba.
Deeds, not words. That was not a slogan. That was an operating constraint. The Canadians do not give interviews. They do not write memoirs. They do not show their faces on news broadcasts. Out of every operator who has served in the unit since 1993, one is publicly named. We will get to him at the end of this video.
You will want to remember his name. The selection process is brutal in a way that is hard to fully convey on camera. You serve 2 years in the regular Canadian forces first. You qualify as a paratrooper. Then you arrive at Dwyer Hill for what is called the assessment phase. And on day one, you do a 13-km march carrying 35 kg of kit, which you must complete in under 2 hours and 26 minutes.
The moment you cross the line with your lungs cooked and your shoulders bleeding, they hand you a rifle and walk you to the edge of a pool, 25 m, boots on, uniform on, rifle in hand, no flotation device, swim. Eight out of every 10 candidates do not make it past that first week. Of the ones who survive selection and finish the 7-month assault course, roughly one in 10 earns the badge.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in a rare on-the-record briefing, described the math like this. Nine out of 10 of Canada’s best soldiers fail [music] this. Nine out of 10 of the best. Now, consider what the budget looked like. In 2001, the unit operated on something between 25 million and 40 million Canadian dollars a year.
The American comparison, the unit they were about to deploy alongside, ran on something north of 1 billion US dollars. 25 times more money, same standard, different zip code. By the autumn of 2001, there were 297 Joint Task Force 2 operators on the books. And then on September 11th, the airliners hit the towers.
Here is what officially happened next, according to the Canadian government’s own public statements at the time. Canada did not have combat troops on the ground [music] in Afghanistan until February of 2002. That is the record. That is what Parliament was told. That is what every newspaper printed.
And here is what actually happened. In early October 2001, weeks before the Canadian public would hear a single word about it, approximately 40 operators from Joint Task Force 2 were placed on a Canadian C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft and flown into southern Afghanistan. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien had not given formal permission.
The documentation for that deployment, according to historian Sean Maloney in his book Enduring the Freedom, did not exist in any normal chain of authorization. The men were simply in the air, then on the ground, then operational before the political class understood the question well enough to ask it. They landed at a strip outside Kandahar.
They were dressed in forest green Canadian combat fatigues. They carried C8 carbines and SIG Sauer P226 side arms. The average age in the group was 28. Pay attention to that uniform, the forest green, because 4 months from now, on a tarmac in this same city, that exact color is going to put a defense minister in front of a parliamentary committee.
The unit they joined was called Task Force K-Bar. Seven countries. American SEALs, German Kommando Spezialkräfte, Norwegian Forsvarets spesialkommando. New Zealand SAS, Danish, Turkish, and Australian elements with Australian SASR operators threading in and out. 1,300 operators inside Afghanistan and 1,500 more positioned across the theater.
The commander was a US Navy captain named Robert Harward. He was 45 years old. He had spent his entire career in naval special warfare. He was the kind of officer the Americans put in charge of things they did not want to lose. His mission was simple to describe and almost impossible to execute. Find the Taliban’s senior leadership.
Find Al-Qaeda cave by cave, compound by compound, mountain by mountain. Get the intelligence [music] out. Kill or capture the rest. Harward needed people who would not need to be supervised. He’d been given on paper seven countries worth of operators. In practice, in the first weeks, he had to find out which of them could be trusted with the door-kicking work and which of them needed an American holding their hand on the radio.
He found out about the Canadians fast. Their first joint mission with the US 3rd Special Forces Group was, in Harward’s own words, the first coalition direct action mission since the Second World War. The target was a Taliban command node. A team of Green Berets and a team of JTF2 operators were inserted by a Chinook helicopter in darkness into territory that had not been swept against an enemy whose strength was unknown.
The mission almost died in the first hour. The Chinook carrying the JTF2 element was forced into a hard landing near the target site in the dark in active hostile terrain. The team did not abort. They did not call for extraction. They walked out of the wreckage, reorganized on the ground, executed the mission they had come for, and pulled out with the prize, a hard drive in the cargo space.
It was the one the helicopter nearly ran out of fuel carrying home. That hard drive, according to the Toronto Star investigation that broke this story years later, would feed the hunt for Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders for months. Now, this is where I’d like you to pay attention to what an American Navy captain learned about Canadians in the space of approximately six weeks.
In January 2002, Harwood Green led a reconnaissance mission into a cave complex called Zhawar Kili, 16 km southwest of Khost, 4 km from the Pakistani border. The Mujahideen had carved the caves out of the rock during the war against the Soviets. The Soviets had failed to take [music] them. Al-Qaeda had been using them as a regrouping point after the bombardment of Tora Bora.
The Canadians went in with them, a platoon from SEAL Team 3, a German KSK element, and a Norwegian SOF team. They spent nine days inside the rock. 70 caves were cleared, 60 structures were cleared. They recovered intelligence in volumes that took weeks to translate, plus weapons in quantities the Pentagon had not anticipated.
The Soviet Army, even with multiple full divisions, had not gotten this deep into Zhawar Kili over the course of a decade. Four nations worth of special operators did it in nine days. The Canadians, working in two-man and four-man elements, were carrying out the underground clearance work the doctrine said was the highest risk task in modern warfare.
The Soviets had refused to do it. Most NATO armies would not do it. The Canadians were doing it the way most people would clear a basement. Then came the mountains, Operation Anaconda, March 2002, the Shah-i-Kot Valley, the largest set piece battle American forces had fought since Vietnam. JTF2 reconnaissance teams were inserted onto exposed ridgelines above 3,000 m.
They sat in temperatures dropping below -15° C after dark. They radioed real-time intelligence to the conventional American forces fighting in the valley below. They held those positions for days without rotation, without resupply. According to US Navy Commander Kerry Mates, who gave congressional testimony on Task Force K-Bar’s operations, JTF2 reconnaissance teams were operating in the mountains of Afghanistan above 10,000 ft for extended periods without resupply.
That sentence is in the United States Congressional Record. Read it again. That sentence is in the record because an American officer was asked under oath how the war in southern Afghanistan was actually being conducted, and his honest answer included a reference to a foreign unit doing a thing his own service was not asking of his own people.
Then came the compound. It was a routine direct action assignment. The location had been confirmed. The number of hostiles inside the compound had been estimated by an American AC-130 gunship orbiting overhead equipped with thermal sensors manned by trained crew. The number the gunship called down to the assault element on the ground was 36 people inside.
The assault element was 24 Joint Task Force 2 operators. The ratio was unfavorable. The operation was approved anyway. They moved on the building in darkness. They breached. They cleared. Nobody fired a weapon. The defenders, every single one of them, surrendered the moment the Canadians came through the wall.
The head count when it was finally completed by the operators standing [music] over the bound prisoners was 53. >> [snorts] >> Not 36. 53. More than double the size of the attacking force. A US Navy gunship equipped with the most sophisticated thermal optics in the world had undercounted by 17 people in a single small building.
24 Canadians had walked into that building anyway on the assumption that the gunships count was wrong by an unknown margin and brought every one of them out alive. You do not see that in the Hollywood version of the war. You do not see that in the books. The defenders surrendered to 24 men because the 24 men coming through the wall did not give the defenders the option to do anything else.
That is a different kind of competence. That is the kind of competence that takes a generation of selection and training to build and that no amount of money on its own can buy. By the time the unit’s 6-month deployment closed in April of 2002, the public record tally read like this: 42 confirmed reconnaissance missions, an undisclosed number of direct action engagements, 115 Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters killed, 107 senior Taliban leaders captured.
Task Force K-Bar, the coalition Harward commanded, was credited with a 100% mission success rate, a figure that traces back to Metz’s congressional testimony. 40 Canadians, 107 captured senior Taliban leaders. The math by itself sounds invented. It is not. And then came the photograph. On the 21st of January 2002, an Associated Press photographer named Dario Lopez Mills was on the flight line at Kandahar airfield when a US helicopter touched down carrying three hooded detainees.
Walking the prisoners off the helicopter were four operators in forest green Canadian Forces [music] combat fatigues, faces visible, unit indicators identifiable. The photograph ran on the front page of The Globe and Mail within the week. In Ottawa, the political class read its own morning newspaper and learned for the first time that Canada had been running combat operations in southern Afghanistan for almost 4 months.
Defense Minister Art Eggleton was summoned before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. The charge was deliberately misleading Parliament. Vice Admiral Greg Madison was called to explain how Canada’s most lethal military instrument had been conducting offensive operations under American command for 4 months without the elected representatives of the country having been informed.
The detainees in the photograph were on their way to a place called Guantanamo Bay. That detail intensified everything. It was not really about JTF2. It was about civilian oversight of the most dangerous weapon a democracy possesses, which is 40 people trained to do anything they’re asked to do without leaving evidence.
The 40 had performed flawlessly. The political architecture above them, the part that exists specifically to keep that capability under control of the elected government, had not. The operators were already on their way home when the photograph hit the front page. They had nothing to do with how the image got out.
They could not have stopped it. After January 2002, the forest green uniform [music] was never seen on a JTF2 tarmac again. From that month forward, JTF2 deployed in generic tan kit, beards, ball caps, and sunglasses. The same operator profile every tier one unit in the theater was using. The recognizable national signature, the thing that made the photograph politically lethal, was simply retired.
Two years later, in December 2004, the President of the United States, George W. Bush, awarded the United States Presidential Unit Citation to the units that had served in Task Force K-Bar. Approximately 40 members of JTF2 were among the recipients. They became the first Canadian unit in the country’s history to receive the Presidential Unit Citation.
The citation said they had earned it for extraordinary heroism and outstanding performance of duty in action against the enemy in Afghanistan. Most of the names were not released. They will never be released. And then, finally, the sentence I told you we would get to in 11 minutes. Captain Robert Harward, United States Navy, the commander of Task Force K-Bar, asked at one point in the published [music] record who he wanted for direct action missions going forward and gave the answer that the Canadian government
had spent four months trying to keep classified. >> [music] >> He said the JTF2 team under his command was his first choice for any direct action mission. His first choice. Not one of his choices, not among his options. His first choice. 40 Canadians on a budget of fraction of his own services operating on a deployment their own prime minister had not authorized in a coalition where every Tier One unit in the Western alliance was represented and competing for his attention.
[music] His first choice. There is exactly one acknowledged JTF2 combat zone death from [music] the Afghan War. His name was Master Corporal Anthony Klumpenhouwer. He was born in Listowel, Ontario, one of 13 children. He joined the Canadian Forces on the 13th of February, 2002, four weeks after his country’s most secret [music] unit had been outed on the front page of The Globe and Mail.
He trained as a land communication and information systems technician. He joined Canadian Special Operations in January, 2007. He deployed to Afghanistan in March of that year. On the 18th of April 2007, he was working on a communications tower in Kandahar City. A Canadian Forces investigation later concluded that he was knocked unconscious by an unexpected electrical surge inside the tower and fell.
He was 25 years old. He was the 54th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2002. He is the only JTF2 operator [music] from the Afghan war whose name is in the public record. The 40 men who walked into Kandahar in October of 2001, the men Harwood asked for first, >> [music] >> the men who took 53 prisoners with 24 operators and not a single round fired, the men who held ridgelines at -15° C for days without resupply, the men whose prime minister learned of their deployment from a newspaper photograph, are not named.
Their files are sealed. Their service records, the parts that describe what they actually did between October of 2001 and April of 2002, remain classified 24 years later. That is, in the end, the point of the unit. The forest green came off the tarmac. The names came out of the public record. What remained was the work.
And the one sentence an American officer let’s slip in praise of them, and a presidential unit citation locked in a safe at Dwyer Hill that the families of the men inside it are not allowed to know belongs to their relative. Facta non verba, deeds not words. The deeds are in the record. The words are classified. The price of being good at this work is that no one will ever know you were the one who did it.
40 men paid that price in southern Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, and the only public receipt for what they accomplished is a single American sentence that someone, somewhere forgot [music] to redact.
