Marines on diplomatic mission

US troops are spreading into Helmand, tasked with clearing the area of Taliban insurgents and supporters, which translates in that province roughly to wiping out a large chunk of its native tribal Pashtun population. At the same time as US forces by the thousands are being helicoptered into remote Afghanistan, Afghan politicians are traveling the country far and wide in the lead up to August’s elections.

As U.S. Marines launched a major offensive against Taliban insurgents in southern Helmand Province, the presidential campaign unfolding in more peaceful parts of northern and eastern Afghanistan last week seemed to be taking place on another planet.

Whether addressing rallies, chatting with voters in the street or receiving delegations of tribal leaders, candidates barely mentioned the violent insurgency that international experts fear could sabotage the Aug. 20 polling.

Instead, the presidential hopefuls stuck to themes they knew would resonate with Afghan audiences. They denounced civilian casualties by foreign forces and called for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.

So, going by this article we can safely assume that Afghans in general are pissed off about the many civilian casualties and would prefer to come peacefully to some arrangement with the Taliban. What they will get instead is The Surge. Obama delivers the exact opposite of what the Afghan people are hoping for. How come I am not the least surprised?

McCrystal is said to be emphasizing the “protective” nature of the Marines mission, but who is he kidding? The Taliban are everywhere, they are everyone, they bloody well live there.

[...] They [US Troops] will have to overcome deeply entrenched suspicions of American aims in the region, and resentment over civilian casualties inflicted during previous U.S. operations. "This operation will cause even more insecurity," says Joma Khan, a 32-year old unemployed man in Lashkar Gah. "Because when people lose their family members or their houses gets destroyed, then they join Taliban."

Aware of the danger, McChrystal has made the protection of civilians the central tenet of his new approach to fighting the Taliban, even going so far as to limit the use of aerial bombardment to the most extreme circumstances - a turnabout for U.S. ground forces that have grown dependent on air support. McChrystal has also declared in a soon-to-be-released tactical directive that soldiers should hold their fire if there is even the slightest risk of a civilian presence in the target zone. "Suppose the insurgent occupies an enemy home or village and engages you from there, with the clear idea that when you respond you are going to create collateral damage," explains McChrystal. "He's going to blame that on you. Even if you kill the insurgents, what happens is you have made the insurgency wider. You are going to run into more IEDs. You are going to run into more insurgents, [and] at the end of the day you are going to suffer more casualties." [...]

Presumably the same people who believe this “we’ve come in peace” crap will also fall hook, line and sinker for Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson’s feel good spiel:

[...] "We’re doing this very differently," Nicholson said, according to the Washington Post. "We’re going to be with the people. We’re not going to drive to work. We’re going to walk to work."

Nicholson emphasised this dual capacity of the Marines’ mission in Helmand: "We’re not going to measure your success by the number of times your ammunition is resupplied," he told officers. "You’re going to drink lots of tea. You’re going to eat lots of goat. Get to know the people." [...]

Marines without air support embedded in the Pashtun population, walking to work and on orders to drink tea with the locals, which planet is that guy living on? They are neither trained/programmed to be diplomats nor are they known to be nice people one can easily walk up to and have a leisurely chat with. These are schooled killers armed to their teeth good at intimidating and snuffing out lives. James Cogan’s view is imho the closest estimate I came across on how this ramp up in troop presence will play out.

The Obama administration has ordered the 2^nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade (2 MEB) into a potentially bloody offensive in the southern province of Helmand. The objective is the suppression of the ethnic Pashtun population, which is overwhelmingly hostile to the seven-and-a-half year US and NATO occupation of the country and rejects the legitimacy of the Afghan puppet government headed by President Hamid Karzai.

Early Thursday morning, 2 MEB began what has been described as the biggest airlift of marines since the Vietnam War. Code-named “Khanjar”—Pashtun for “strike of the sword”—the operation is the largest undertaken by the Marine Corp since it led the assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. In all, some 4,000 marines and a 600-strong battalion of the Afghan Army are involved, supported by an array of jet fighters, unmanned drones and helicopter gunships.

An article in Friday’s New York Times by veteran war correspondent Carlotta Gall, who has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001, made clear why Helmand has been targeted for the first major operation in Obama’s Afghan “surge”.

She wrote that the “mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan”. People have “taken up arms against the foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger at losing relatives in airstrikes”.

Gall noted: “The southern provinces have suffered the worst civilian casualties since NATO’s deployment into the region in 2006. Thousands of people have been displaced by fighting and taken refuge in the towns. ‘Now there are more people siding with the Taliban than with the government’, said Abdul Qadir Noorzai, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission...”

One man interviewed by Gall in June declared: “Who are the Taliban? They are the local people.” Another, whose house was bombed by US jets two months ago, said: “We Muslims don’t like them [the foreign troops]. They are the source of danger.” […]

The offensive has been timed to coincide with the initial stages of an assault by the Pakistani military into the tribal agency of South Waziristan. The ethnic Pashtun tribal agencies are largely controlled by Islamist movements with close links to the Taliban, who provide Afghan guerillas with safe haven and contribute their own fighters to the anti-occupation insurgency. […]

The marines in Helmand will duplicate the methods used by the US military in Iraq and they are well qualified to do so. Most of the 2 MEB units, and many of the officers and enlisted men, served one or multiple tours in Iraq’s western province of Anbar. The surge tactics were first tested in Anbar, a centre of Sunni Arab resistance to the US invasion. Over two years, the marines honed their counter-insurgency methods at the cost of thousands of Iraqi lives and the repression of the entire population.

Everyone in the newly occupied areas of Helmand—men, women and children—will be treated as potential insurgents. Bases will be established in towns and villages, from which US troops will use intimidation to identify resistance fighters. Afghans will face constant road-blocks, identity checks and searches. Men of fighting age will have to endure the most humiliating treatment. Local tribal leaders will be offered cash bribes to order their clans to collaborate with the occupation. If they refuse, they will be marked as Taliban sympathisers [...]…. Read the full text here.

For the people living there it’s a lose/lose situation, and I have a feeling that when US troops will be leaving Afghanistan at some point in the future, they’ll be just as popular amongst “the liberated” as they were in Vietnam on their day of departure or now in Iraq.