Unless, by some sudden change of its course, the government and Liberals reach an agreement on some sort of post-2011 CF mission:

The silent road home

Canada’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will be a lengthy, complicated process and the only thing the government will say with certainty is that all troops will be home by the end of next year, writes Matthew Fisher.

Soldiers with BRAVO Company, 1st battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment [part of CF's Task Force 1-10, current Task Force Kandahar details here] leave their base to patrol outside the village of Nakhonay in Afghanistan on June 11. Canadian troops will be leaving the war against the Taliban next year.
Photograph by: Denis Sinyakov, Reuters, The Ottawa Citizen; with files from Sheldon Alberts, canwest news service

Exactly one year from this Canada Day the Harper government officially begins its retreat from Kandahar.

However, details regarding the Canadian Forces’ withdrawal from the war against the Taliban are shrouded in far more secrecy than many combat operations here…

…All that anyone seems to be allowed to say is that Canadian troops are definitely leaving Afghanistan; combat operations will continue until the July 1, 2011, deadline; and all troops will be home by the end of next year.

The one disclosure — made a few weeks ago by a visiting air force general — was that Canadian helicopter operations in Kandahar are to end by early August next year [see Joint Task Force Afghanistan Air Wing, more here--why could we not keep the Air Wing going, see here?].

In Washington on Tuesday, Gen. David Petraeus cautioned Americans to prepare for several more years of war in Afghanistan and cast the Obama administration’s July 2011 timeline to begin withdrawing troops as a highly flexible deadline…

It is now widely assumed, although not publicly announced, that U.S. troops will begin to take over Canada’s last combat responsibilities in the province from a battle group led by the Quebec-based Royal 22nd Regiment, known as the Van Doos [the main part of next Task Force 3-10, photos here], sometime late next spring .

A series of ceremonial handovers is bound to take place between Canadian and American commanders between now and next Canada Day. They will mark the close of an unlikely chapter in Canadian military history — an unexpected combat deployment that was initiated with almost no public discussion by the Chrétien and Martin governments that is now ending with the first withdrawal of Canadian combat forces before the war they were fighting has concluded.

Just as the war ramps up this year with a surge of U.S. troops, Canada’s military footprint has already begun shrinking.

Where until recently Canadian troops were stretched across a territory the size of New Brunswick, they are now mostly squeezed into an area the size of Ottawa.

Canada remains responsible to NATO for all of Kandahar, but most of Canada’s combat forces are now in Panjwaii District, to the west of Kandahar City. A couple of hundred Canadian soldiers still remain in the provincial capital, which is to come under U.S. command by early fall [emphasis added]. Another handful of Canadian troops are scattered across Spin Boldak near the Pakistan border and in Arghandab and Dand districts…

A logistics colonel, who is to be promoted to brigadier-general next year, has already been chosen to lead the closeout mission. His troops are to be protected by soldiers from the Alberta-based Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry [that will be Task Force 1-11, 3 PPCLI--not a battle group as with previous rotos].

Detailed inventories of what is where at Kandahar Airfield and at forward operating bases and strongpoints have begun to be compiled. More than 1,000 vehicles must be retrieved as well as thousands of weapons, pallets of ammunition, office and communications equipment and temporary accommodations.

Once this mountain of gear is at the airfield, several months will be spent cleaning and re-organizing it for the return to Canada.

A lot of the non-sensitive material will go by road through Pakistan to be loaded on to ships bound for Halifax and Montreal. But all the fighting paraphernalia will have to either be airlifted to intermediate points in the Middle East or Europe for transfer to ships or, in many cases, flown directly to Canada…

As the Canadian military does not have nearly enough airlift capability for such an undertaking, scores of flights using Soviet-era cargo jets are going to be chartered at a cost of as much as $1.5 million per round trip…

As Kipling wrote:

Lest we forget – lest we forget

Mark
Ottawa