By DEXTER FILKINS
KABUL, Afghanistan — For all the fighting that lies ahead over the next several days, no one doubts that the American and Afghan troops who will swarm into the Taliban redoubt of Marja will ultimately clear it of insurgents.
And that’s when the real test will begin.
For much of the past eight years, American and NATO forces have mounted other large military operations to clear towns and cities of Taliban insurgents. And then, almost invariably, they have cleared out, never leaving behind enough soldiers or police to hold the place on their own.
And so, almost always, the Taliban returned — and, after a time, so did the American and NATO troops, to clear the place all over again.
“Mowing the grass,” the soldiers and Marines derisively call it.
Now American and Afghan troops are poised to take Marja, a Taliban-held town in southern Helmand province. It is not clear when the battle will begin, but this time commanders say they will do something they have never done before: bring in an Afghan government and police force behind them. American and British troops will stay on to support them.
“We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander here.
Indeed, Marja is intended to serve as a prototype for a new type of military operation, based on the counter-insurgency thinking propounded by General McChrystal in the run-up to President Obama’s decision in December to boost the number of American troops here to nearly 100,000.
More than at any time since 2001, American and NATO soldiers will focus less on killing Taliban insurgents than on sparing Afghan civilians and building an Afghan state.
“The population is not the enemy,” Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the commander of the Marines in southern Afghanistan, told a group of troops this week. “The population is the prize — they are why we are going in.”
To realize their goals, the Americans and their allies want to capture the area with a minimum amount of violence. American commanders say the attack on Marja is intended to be nothing like the similarly sized assault on the city of Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004. In that case, Falluja, under the control of hundreds of insurgents, was largely destroyed. The Americans killed plenty of guerrillas, but they did not make any friends.
“We don’t want Falluja,” General McChrystal said in an interview this week. “Falluja is not the model.”
Sparing civilian life may not be easy, especially in the close-quarters combat that lies ahead. Hundreds of Taliban fighters are believed to be in the area. And the American-led force may yet get bogged down — by the network of irrigation canals, built by the United States in the 1950s, or by the hundreds of homemade bombs that Taliban fighters have planted in the roads and trails.
The chief worry among both American and Afghan commanders is that if a large number of civilians are killed, the Afghan government — including its sometimes erratic president, Hamid Karzai — could withdraw its support.
The Americans are hoping, too, that the largely Afghan composition of the invading force — about 60 percent of the total — will give Mr. Karzai’s government sufficient cover if anything goes wrong.
But at some point the operation will end, and when it does General McChrystal has set goals for the Americans and the Afghans that are less dramatic, but far more ambitious, than fighting.
For the first time, NATO and Afghan officials have assembled a large team of Afghan administrators and an Afghan governor that will move into Marja the moment the shooting stops. More than 1,900 police are standing by.
Setting up a government in this impoverished country is no small task. Across Afghanistan, the Afghan government and its police are reviled for their inefficiency and corruption.
“We want to show people that we can deliver police, and services, and development, said Lt. Gen. Sher Mohammed Karimi, the deputy chief of staff of the Afghan National Army. “We want to convince the Afghans that the government is for them.”
At a broader level, the attack on Marja is the first move in an ambitious effort to break the Taliban in their heartland. Over the next several months, the Americans are hoping to secure a 200-mile long horseshoe shaped string of cities that runs along the Helmand River, through Kandahar and then on to the Pakistani border. The ribbon holds 85 percent of the population of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, the Taliban’s base of support. In the next several months, the Americans and Afghans are planning to pour thousands of troops there.
“We are trying to take away any hope of victory,” General McChrystal said.
That would set the stage for a political settlement that General McChrystal believe is the only way the war will end.
The risks in the strategy are obvious enough. Eight years after being expelled from Kabul, the Taliban are fighting more vigorously, and operating in more places, than at any point since the American-led war began here in 2001. The Taliban have “shadow governors” in every province but Kabul itself. Twice the number of Americans soldiers were killed last year as the year before.
And there is some chance, even after the offensive, that the insurgents will simply flee to another part of the country. They’ve done it before; many of the fighters now inside Marja once operated in other Helmand towns.
Finally, there is only so much the Americans and their NATO partners can do. The rest is up to the Afghans themselves. Despite years of work, the Afghan Army cannot sustain itself in the field, the police are loathed in nearly every place they work, and the government of President Hamid Karzai has only a few serious worldwide rivals in corruption and graft.
In a conversation this week, a senior American official in Kabul said that his greatest worry was not the Taliban, or even that the Marja operation would fail. “What do I worry about?” he said, “Dependency.” That is, the fear that Afghanistan’s leaders and people will not, in the end, stand up for themselves.
In that sense, who emerges as the victor in Marja may not be clear for many months.
N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13kabul.html?hp
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