"Marines’ role an issue in Afghan campaign; Some say troops misplaced in effort to counter Taliban" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post | March 22, 2010
DELARAM, Afghanistan — Home to a dozen truck stops and a few hundred family farms bounded by miles of foreboding desert, this hamlet in southwestern Afghanistan is far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul.
One calls Delaram, a day’s drive from the nearest city, “the end of the earth.’’ Another deems the area “unrelated to our core mission’’ of defeating the Taliban by protecting Afghans in their cities and towns.
US Marine commanders have a different view of the dusty, desolate landscape that surrounds Delaram. They see controlling this corner of remote Nimruz province as essential to promoting economic development and defending the more populated parts of southern Afghanistan.
The Marines are constructing a vast base on the outskirts of town that will have two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store, and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see.
But we are LEAVING IN A YEAR, yup!
Let's face it, America, we are NEVER LEAVING and you are being LIED TO AGAIN!!
By this summer, more than 3,000 Marines — one-10th of the additional troops authorized by President Obama in December — will be based here.
With Obama’s July 2011 deadline to begin reducing US forces looming over the horizon, the Marines have opted to wage the war in their own way.
Oh, now it is only a REDUCTION, huh?
That is why the PERMANENT BASE is going up, huh?
“If we’re going to succeed here, we have to experiment and take risks,’’ said Brigadier General Lawrence Nicholson, the top Marine commander in Afghanistan. “Just doing what everyone else is doing isn’t going to cut it.’’
The Marines are pushing into previously ignored Taliban enclaves. They have set up a first-of-its-kind school to train police officers. They have brought in a Muslim chaplain to pray with local mullahs and deployed teams of female Marines to reach out to Afghan women.
Related: Spies Like Them in Afghanistan
Yeah, that's "different."
The Marine approach — creative, aggressive, and, at times, unorthodox — has won many admirers within the military. The Marine emphasis on patrolling by foot and interacting with the population, which has helped to turn former insurgent strongholds along the Helmand River valley into reasonably stable communities with thriving bazaars and functioning schools, is hailed as a model of how US forces should implement counterinsurgency strategy.
As long as they don't step on a bomb, right?
But the Marines’s methods, and their insistence that they be given a degree of autonomy not afforded to US Army units, also have riled many up the chain of command in Kabul and Washington, prompting some to refer to their area of operations in the south as “Marineistan.’’
They regard the expansion in Delaram and beyond as contrary to the population-centric approach embraced by General Stanley McChrystal, the US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, and they are seeking to impose more control over the Marines.
The US ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, recently noted that the international security force in Afghanistan feels as if it comprises 42 nations instead of 41, because the Marines act so independently. “We have better operational coherence with virtually all of our NATO allies than we have with the US Marine Corps,’’ said a senior Obama administration official involved in Afghanistan policy.
Some senior officials at the White House, at the Pentagon, and in McChrystal’s headquarters would rather have many of the 20,000 Marines who will be in Afghanistan by summer deploy around Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city, to assist in a US campaign to wrest the area from Taliban control instead of concentrating in neighboring Helmand province and points west.
Whatever. Who cares about war pigs and their arguing?
Not enough troops, huh?
Did you just feel a draft, America?
They question whether a large operation that began last month to flush the Taliban out of Marja, a poor farming community in central Helmand, is the best use of Marine resources. Although it has unfolded with fewer than expected casualties and helped to generate a perception of momentum in the US-led military campaign, the mission probably will tie up two Marine battalions and hundreds of Afghan security forces until the summer.
Yeah, THOSE MISSILE STRIKES that ANNIHILATED PEOPLE as we went in?
Related: AmeriKa Letting the Missiles Fly in Marjah
ALL FORGOTTEN!
Also see: The Taking of Marjah
I'm tired of being lied to, readers.
Until earlier this month, McChrystal lacked operational control over the Marines, which would have allowed him to move them to other parts of the country. That power rested with a three-star Marine general at the US Central Command. He and other senior Marine commanders insisted that Marines in Afghanistan have a contiguous area of operations — effectively precluding them from being split up and sent to Kandahar — because they think it is essential the Marines are supported by Marine helicopters and logistics units, instead of relying on the Army.
How about BRINGING THEM HOME?
