Marines Bring Calm To Helmand
BY Herschel Smith
15 years ago
One of our favorite reporters, Tony Perry with the LA Times, brings us a report from the Helmand Province.
By Tony Perry
November 8, 2009
Reporting from Nawa, Afghanistan
When 500 U.S. Marines descended on this Taliban stronghold overnight, Afghan civilians were immediately suspicious about the intentions of the heavily armed Americans.
One question dominated all others: How long will the Americans stay? Five months later, there is still no clear answer.
“The No. 1 question the Marines get is: ‘When are you going home?’ ” said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, an Iraq combat veteran and now the top Marine in Afghanistan. “They can’t believe we’re staying.”
Three battalions landed 4,500 troops in Helmand province in the early hours of July 2, the largest airborne assault since Vietnam.
But the long-term U.S. commitment to Helmand is unclear, as President Obama and Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, continue to reevaluate U.S. strategy.
One issue is whether U.S. forces should be massed more closely to large population centers, including Kabul, the capital, which could mean depleting the forces in rural regions like Helmand.
In mid-June about 200 Marines arrived here to relieve a beleaguered British platoon. Days later, 500 more arrived in helicopters to establish a central base, called Geronimo, and then smaller ones, including Cherokee here in Nawa.
After 10 days of intense fighting, the Marines pushed Taliban fighters out of several small villages. The troops fanned out and announced to startled villagers that they had arrived to protect the population from the Taliban.
But a whisper campaign, which Marines blame on the Taliban, suggested that the Americans would leave as soon as President Hamid Karzai was reelected. The message was clear: Anyone who cooperates with the Americans is marked for death.
“They’re very hesitant to trust us, and I don’t blame them,” said Capt. Frank “Gus” Biggio, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and Marine reservist who heads a civil-affairs team in Nawa. “For centuries, they’ve seen foreigners come and go, promises made and broken.”
The 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment, which was assigned to protect Nawa, is set to return home to Camp Pendleton by Christmas. Advance elements of its replacement, the 1st Battalion, 3rd Regiment from Hawaii, have already come to be introduced to the elders and be seen in marketplaces and other gathering spots. They will be on a seven-month deployment.
The Marines have held numerous meetings with village elders to convince them that they will protect the community until Afghan security forces are strong enough to take over. In return, the Marines asked for information on Taliban fighters’ movements and methods, including roadside bombs.
Dusty, sunbaked Helmand is considered the insurgency’s heartland. A person who is helpful and friendly with the U.S. one day may be helping the Taliban the next, Marines said.
“There are no quick fixes here, no resting on your laurels,” said Lt. Col. William McCollough, commander of the 1-5. “It’s up one day, it’s down another day.”
In the 1960s, the U.S. poured millions of dollars into building canals to irrigate the province’s fields of corn, wheat and fruit trees.
Officials of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development who arrived shortly after the Marines are planning to upgrade the canals, using local labor. They also hope that with more water, the farmers will not plant the opium poppies that supply the world heroin market and provide funds for the Taliban.
After the Marines arrived, Taliban fighters fled a few miles away to a community called Marja. The Marines have made no secret that, together with the Afghan national army, they plan to rout the Taliban from Marja in a sweep akin to that of the November 2004 battle of Fallouja, Iraq.
Nicholson, the Marine commander, calls Marja a “cancer in Helmand” that he is eager to eliminate.
Throughout the province — though not in Marja — Marines patrol daily, in Humvees or on foot, sometimes accompanied by Afghan soldiers. Marine civil-affairs teams, along with the civilian agencies, are working to win the confidence of villagers with small projects that hire local people to clear roads, take care of schools and build bridges.
The Marines are putting up plywood buildings to replace the hastily erected tents that house their troops, communication gear and other things. McCollough hopes the effort will thwart the village chatter about the U.S. leaving soon.
“In Afghanistan, that’s a permanent structure,” McCollough said of the buildings.
Though there may be anxiety about the future, everyday life for many people in Helmand has improved: Outside Nawa, the Taliban no longer has checkpoints on roads to extort money from people. A school, closed by the Taliban, is reopening.
The biggest change may be the flourishing marketplace. Under the Taliban, few storekeepers dared open lest they face extortion or punishment for selling Western goods.
But on Friday, dozens of stalls were open along two dusty streets, offering vegetables, fruit, candy, clothing, toys, motorbike parts and slaughtered chickens.
Several Afghans interviewed expressed differing opinions on whether the Americans would keep their promise not to leave abruptly. Some refused to talk about the Americans.
Nabi, 25, who goes by one name, has a U.S.-paid job clearing canals. He shrugged his shoulders when asked whether he thought the Americans would stay.
“I don’t know,” he said, with some hesitation. “Only God knows.”
This report has similar themes as those brought to us by Michael Yon concerning the permanence of structures and the desire (on the part of the Afghanis) to see the U.S. in the struggle for the long haul. As a sidebar comment, both of these accounts serve as defeater arguments for Matthew Hoh’s arguments that the Afghanis don’t want us in Afghanistan (as pointed out by commenter Davod). A counterinsurgency campaign is simply too complicated to sum up in a single line narrative, something that more maturity would have taught Mr. Hoh (Mr. Hoh should have given himself a couple more decades of wisdom and experience before weighing in on such serious national policy issues as whether the U.S. has business in Afghanistan).
But concerning Tony Perry’s informative report, the issue of patience and longevity is raised. I have always been a proponent of seeing Afghanistan as the longest phase of the long war, and serious commitment is still necessary to win the counterinsurgency campaign. But this report from Bing West also points to other themes in our stable of doctrines.
This is reminiscent of our counsel in Why We Must Chase the Taliban. Yes, cut and run is not an option. A sense of pseudo-permanence is required, and despite what the pundits claim the troops are available for this mission. But eventually the enemy must be killed and it must be made highly unappealing to become a part of the insurgency. This requires chasing and killing the enemy.
On November 9, 2009 at 10:36 am, TSAlfabet said:
Two observations that this post brings to mind.
First, the U.S. is at its most formidable when it has the political will to commit overwhelming firepower and forces toward a relatively quick resolution. Our national bent is (and has always been) toward quick, violent, and decisive action.
Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent work, “The Soul of Battle,” which traces this spirit of aggressive, all-out wars of liberation by democracies. Sherman and Patton were classic examples he cites. In this view, the U.S. did very well in A-stan until we drew a line at the Pak border and held ourselves in check. As soon as it was clear that Al Qaeda and the Taliban were regrouping in Pakistan, the U.S. should have made it absolutely clear to the Pak government that U.S. forces ARE going to pursue AQ by every means into the FATA and the Pakistanis can either ally with us or become our enemy too, but that is the deal. End of story. It is extremely unlikely that Pakistan, having its military tied up on the border with India, would risk having its armed forces wiped out in a futile stand against the U.S. military. In war, there can be no “safe zones” for the enemy. The U.S. could have and should have rolled right into Pakistan after AQ and the Taliban and crushed them. Then back across the border to A-stan to maintain a garrison presence until such time, if any, as another overwhelming operation into Pakistan would be needed. In the meantime, allow A-stan to develop its own political arrangements so long as they do not interfere with our operations.
That is water under the proverbial bridge now, however. The point is that Americans can and do support surges of military force: we are a people who want to get the job done and get it done quickly without a lot of “dithering.” We do not want a large number of troops committed for a long time to ‘nation building.’ We don’t mind giving huge amounts of aid to countries to re-build themselves (such as post-war Europe and Japan and South Korea etc…) but Americans have no patience for the kind of colonial occupation that suited the British temperament. It is not our nature to assume a colonial mantle.
The second observation here is that, having failed to use overwhelming force, we must eschew all thoughts of a war of attrition and, instead, invest the Locals in this fight. Right now, the Locals are doing the most realistic kind of calculus that Man can do: Can I defeat the enemy or must I knuckle under to their brutality? Right now the U.S. is telling the Locals, “We will protect you from the Taliban,” and the Locals can plainly see this is nonsense. As one village elder so poignantly put it in the video TCJ posted some time back, “Can you block out the sun with two fingers?” In other words, it is blatantly obvious to everyone that the U.S. does not have sufficient forces to protect the Locals from the enemy. And it is becoming more apparent with this Admin that we will NEVER have enough forces to do that. Even if the Admin finally gets off its ass and decides to send 40,000 troops, how long will that last? 40,000 isn’t enough to protect a population spread out over such a huge, rural area. And, again, the American public is simply not going to support this war of attrition over the long haul. We MUST turn this around from being a campaign where the U.S. protects the Locals to one where the Locals protect THEMSELVES.
A real, alternative is to give the Locals the means to protect themselves, backed up by U.S. muscle to ensure that the locals can beat back any concentrated attack. This is extremely feasible and solves many problems that the current U.S.-oriented approach encounters.
As Major Jim Gant and others who have worked with the Locals point out, they have excellent intelligence on the enemy in their area: they know exactly who the bad guys are, where they are, when they are going to attack and where. People like Tim Lynch have observed that where the Locals support the civilian projects he is working on, SECURITY IS NOT A PROBLEM. The enemy leaves them alone because the Locals make sure that the enemy knows not to interfere. The enemy is almost entirely dependent upon the acquiescence if not active support of the Locals.
Somehow, we need to convince the Locals that it is in their best interest to oppose the Taliban. That shouldn’t be that difficult as every survey of Afghan opinion shows that the overwhelming majority despise the Taliban after a decade of brutal Taliban rule, but, so far, we are not succeeding. The sticking point is that the Locals are not equipped to stop the Taliban. The U.S. can easily help here by providing arms and ammunition to the Locals to defend themselves. Once this happens, it is not a question of bringing in tens of thousands of U.S. troops to protect the Locals. The U.S. simply needs to maintain quick reaction forces, close air support and artillery that can be called in if needed by the Locals. The greatly reduces the need for U.S. forces. The civic projects can flow from there as local U.S. commanders reward/incentivize Locals to keep the enemy out.
The U.S. has done this before in S. Vietnam with the successful hamlet strategy and a version of it that pacified Anbar in Iraq. I agree with the Captain that kinetic operations in Anbar played a large role in convincing the Sunnis to side with the Marines but the dynamics in A-stan are different than Anbar in some respects. There is no Sunni-Shia equivalent in A-stan, so the Locals are not tempted to support the Taliban as leverage against a rival religious/ethnic group. Just the opposite: the majority of the Taliban come from one tribe, the Pashtuns. Unlike the Sunni, most Locals still do not see Americans as an occupier that must be resisted, so there is no need in A-stan to show the Locals the futility of resistance. (In fact, it could be argued that our current approach which relies on heavier troop presence is wearing out our welcome). Perhaps the greatest shared attribute between Anbar and A-stan is the need for the U.S. to show that it is the Strongest Tribe. Once the Sunnis in Anbar were convinced that the Marines could not be beaten, that helped to accelerate alliances. In A-stan, the Locals need convincing, too. Fortunately, the U.S. can demonstrate that in a way, according to Steve Pressfield and Major Gant, that has immediate currency to Afghans: Guns and Money. The U.S. has unmatched resources to arm and equip the Locals. This translates into influence and authority with the Locals. The Locals want to be left alone, by both the Taliban and the U.S. And “amen” to that. The U.S. should be glad to let them continue undisturbed. In fact, we only earn their ire when we try to come in an impose Western ways on them. This approach does not require legions of troops but, rather, core units of advisors who can interact with Local leaders and ensure a continuity of effort. Kinetic ops will still take place by U.S. forces, of course, but in a much more coordinated fashion with Locals that will maximize effectiveness and minimize local irritations.
Notice how much easier A-stan becomes once the Locals have a vested interest in the fight against the enemy. IED’s will largely disappear because the Locals know who is emplacing them and have an interest in making sure that the U.S. forces have freedom of movement. Moreover, with the Locals provideing their own security, there is less need for patrolling that exposes U.S. forces to attack and, again, the Locals have the incentive to keep their area free of enemy activity. The Locals will ensure that U.S. forces are not targeted. Logistics become easier when the Locals know that the convoy of supplies is benefiting them and will take it upon themselves to safeguard the roads and likely ambush sites. U.S. forces no longer have to guess about who and where the enemy is as the Locals have an interest in keeping them out. This also eliminates the ridiculous ROE problems we have right now by eliminating the rationale that we are alienating the Locals. If the Locals are the ones calling in the CAS (with U.S. liaison of some sort), there will be no complaints. The enemy will not be able to use the Locals as a shield and if they do, the Locals will only be reinforced in their commitment to oppose them.
It could be argued that the Locals have the incentive now to keep U.S. aid flowing, so why are the Locals not suppressing the enemy now? One part of the answer is that where the U.S. has managed to get the Locals ON OUR SIDE, we do see the enemy suppressed. Again, Tim Lynch at Free Range International is an authority on this. But the main answer to this objection is that, for the most part, the U.S. is intent on putting itself as the protector of the Locals (and alienating them in the process) rather than winning them over to take up the fight themselves. Afghans are a warrior people group. Tribal. Yet, so far, we have largely refused (for whatever reasons) to arm the Locals and invest them in their own protection. Again, one way to do this is explained by Major Jim Gant. It is not the only way. But the U.S. must start actively engaging the Locals with a sustainable strategy. Bringing in 40,000 or 80,000 more troops to live with the Locals in every village is NOT sustainable and is self-defeating. But using smaller numbers of troops act as Provincial QRF’s and then focusing on smaller groups of specialized advisors to recruit and win over the Locals is something that Americans will support. Historically, we have had no problem basing troops in places like Germany, Japan, the Philippines and Korea, but the slow, attrition warfare of A-stan is not politically sustainable and it plays right into the hands of the enemy.