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As the only officer to twice lead the Canadian ground combat task force in Kandahar, he has reflected on his experiences there and how they might inform Canada’s new air combat task force, which is temporarily based in Kuwait.

While preparations have gone smoothly so far, “don’t get me wrong. It is an extremely complex situation,” he said.

The biggest difference between ISIS and the Taliban is that the new enemy manoeuvres “in a fairly conventional way,” unlike the Taliban fighters Canadian soldiers confronted during his Afghan tours in 2009 and 2010.

Coalition forces could achieve their stated aim of partnering with Iraqi security forces and the Kurdish peshmerga to push ISIS out of Iraq, he said.

“At this particular juncture, when we act as decisively as we can, [ISIS] is quite vulnerable to defeat, whereas the Taliban were not vulnerable to military defeat, certainly by the time I got there. They needed to be defeated in other ways with counter-insurgency techniques.”

One of the reasons was the Taliban could take refuge in Pakistan whenever the military situation in Afghanistan became too hot for them.

In contrast, “I would say there is not a great deal of fertile ground for [ISIS] at this point in time in either Syria or Iraq,” Lt.-Gen. Vance said.

“I think that they are somewhat absent a safe haven. They have to fight for everything and maintain their interior lines.”

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The fact ISIS has many foreign fighters is also an advantage and a disadvantage, he noted. It gives them “an international visibility that is calling foreign fighters to them in a greater way, perhaps, than the Taliban.”