Madness in Marja

Before the offensive began, leaflets were dropped all over Marja, in Nada Ali district of Afghanistan’s Helmand province, warning civilians of the impending military strike. This Taliban stronghold, rife with armed rebel forces and opium farms where this nefarious crop generates the cash necessary to support Taliban activities, has been a sore spot for NATO allies and the Afghan government itself, although the latter was hoping for more of reconciliation than an attack. 15,000 NATO and Afghan troops have lumbered into the area, determine to take and hold this Taliban fortress region as a part of President Obama’s seeming strategy of enhancing our military position (the big “surge”) before engaging in peace talks with the Taliban leadership.

My mind recalled old tapes from Vietnam, where then-President Richard Nixon embraced much the same policy in his negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Reports of progress flowed from the Pentagon, notwithstanding a fairly successful earlier attack by Viet Cong and North Vietnam regulars against the South and the U.S. that began on January 31, 1968. In the end, we left, South Vietnam fell, and the North plus its Viet Cong won a complete victory. The volume on those tapes grew louder as I read stories of how a NATO rocket malfunction inadvertently killed 12 civilians and how: “On the first full day of operations, much of the expected resistance failed to materialize. Certainly there was none of the eyeball-to-eyeball fighting that typified the battle for Falluja in Iraq in 2004, to which the invasion of Marja had been compared.” February 14^th New York Times

With an easy escape route to Pakistani safe havens and the ability to plant bombs and booby-traps to ensnare the NATO invaders over time, except for sporadic counter-attacks, the Taliban avoid much of the conflict. The February 14^th Los Angeles Times: “In line with their usual practice, insurgents avoided massing for a confrontation, instead staging hit-and-run attacks. Even the Marines' commander, Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, had to duck sniper fire Sunday as he was visiting a front-line Marine position, the Associated Press reported…For the advancing Marines, it was a rough, dirty slog -- and a slow one. Companies of U.S. and Afghan troops moved through the streets, carefully detonating improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in their path. Plumes of dusty smoke arose from the blast sites… Commanders acknowledge that such ‘clearing’ could go on for days or weeks. The town and its outskirts are thickly sown with homemade bombs, which are the insurgents' weapon of choice against much better armed coalition troops.”

While there has been no large-scale defensive response, the NATO troops’ progress is agonizingly slower than predicted: The February 15^th Los Angeles: “Reporting from Marja, Afghanistan, and Kabul, Afghanistan -- Ambushes, sniper fire and a labyrinth of buried bombs again slowed a drive by U.S. Marines and Afghan troops Monday to rid a former Taliban stronghold of insurgents… The arduous pace of progress on the offensive's third day appeared to bear out commanders' predictions that clearing the town of Marja, in troubled Helmand province, could take weeks, rather than days as initially hoped.”

There will be no crushing defeat for the Taliban in Afghanistan; we are hundreds of thousands of troops short of expanding our presence to command control even most of the country. There will be no massive extermination of “rebel” forces in a supreme battle with thousands of Taliban casualties; they have only to leave Marja – for alternative venues in Afghanistan or to safe havens across the border – and wait for another day. Unless we have plans to invade and hold a large part of nuclear-power Pakistan, the Taliban will always have an escape plan. The NATO instrumentality of local government is the systemically corrupt Hamid Karzai regime, very hard to justify on any moral or ethical basis. And unless we plan on spending trillions more on decades of continued military presence in Afghanistan, time is very much on the side of local rebels.

We are Western invaders, most untrustworthy in the eyes of most people in the region; we are not seen as friendly support. The last country to try this was the Soviet Union, and they’re not around anymore. The attempt at enhancing our bargaining position prior to negotiating with the Taliban seems to be creating the opposite effect; we are proving to them that we are unable inflict heavy losses against them. What we are doing, very successfully, is burning through billions of dollars and killing NATO forces and civilians alike for what is looking more and more like a lost cause. We really need to stop the mounting casualties and to deploy that money somewhere else. Now!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I’d like to see someone plan what will actually work.