The face of counterinsurgency in Nawa

Washington Post:

Most of the mud-brick stalls that line the street in this sweltering town on the Helmand River closed down a year ago when Taliban fighters began swaggering through the bazaar, levying taxes on merchants and seeding the roads with homemade bombs. Shopkeepers placed their wares behind padlocked tin doors, teachers shuttered the school, the doctor abandoned the health clinic and residents with means fled to other parts of southern Afghanistan.

This town does not merit a dot on most maps of Afghanistan. But U.S. civilian and military officials believe what happens to the chockablock market here will be a key indicator of whether President Obama can salvage a war the United States has been losing.

About 4,000 troops -- most of them U.S. Marines -- descended upon Nawa and other towns along the lower Helmand River valley 10 days ago in a massive operation to root out the Taliban. Their aim is to combat the insurgency in a new way: Instead of targeting extremist strongholds, they will aim to protect communities from the Taliban.

In Nawa, that means getting life back to normal. If that occurs, military commanders reason, it will be much more difficult for the insurgents to hold sway here.

"We'll be successful when we can walk up and down that street and most shops will be open, there will be a flow of commerce, there will be a recognizable and functioning government, there will be kids in school and doctors in the clinic," said Capt. Frank "Gus" Biggio, a Marine reservist who is on leave from the Washington law firm Patton Boggs to lead a civil-affairs unit in Nawa.

But employing U.S. forces to restore a sense of normalcy in a country ravaged by 30 years of war involves a series of assumptions and a set of challenges that are already proving more complicated than mounting hunt-and-kill missions against the Taliban. Will residents want the Marines to stick around? Will those who do be convinced that the Americans will stay until security improves? Will residents trust the local leaders -- including the police chief, whom one Marine officer calls "the Tony Soprano of Nawa" -- to run the town better than the Taliban?

An affirmative answer to those questions is not at all certain, and it will not just require the Marines to wage a different sort of war. The United States will have to spend billions more dollars to expand training for Afghanistan's army and police forces. Ineffective development programs will have to be overhauled. State Department diplomats and Agriculture Department specialists will need to deploy in larger numbers. And if the approach being employed in the Helmand River valley is extended to other areas under Taliban control, it could well result in the need for thousands more U.S. troops.

Marines have been heartened by the initial indications in Nawa. A dozen stalls have reopened in the market. People have approached patrols to express support for the troop presence. And perhaps most significantly, the Taliban appears to have retreated -- for now.

"Thirty days from now, the people will say: 'Okay. Great. You've cleared the Taliban out. Now what's in it for me?' " said Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, the comman der of Marine forces in southern Afghanistan. "We have a very narrow window to bring about change."

...

Nicholson had wanted his troops to conduct every patrol and man every checkpoint with members of the Afghan National Army, largely because people here take less umbrage at being searched by fellow Afghans, and Afghan soldiers have a keener sense of who ought to be searched. But plans to partner with the Afghan army have been scaled back because the Marines have been allotted only about 400 Afghan soldiers instead of the several thousand Nicholson had sought.

He has been promised more troops, but they will not start rolling in until next year. In the interim, he has asked his superiors for permission to arm young men and train them to serve as a local protection force. It is similar to the Sons of Iraq initiative the Marines created in Anbar that resulted in locals turning against foreign fighters in the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But senior commanders have shown no sign of approving the request. They feel Helmand has too many overlapping tribal rivalries. Arming groups of young men could exacerbate tensions and lead some factions to turn to the Taliban for protection.

...

As a Marine patrol walked through the bazaar on a recent morning, its presence prompted a group of men sipping tea in front of a motorcycle repair shop to voice concern -- not that the Americans had arrived but that they might depart before the Taliban had been vanquished.

"If you leave, everything will be the same," a middle-aged man who called himself Sayed Gul told McCollough. "If you guys stay for a long time, everything will be fine."

This is from a very long story, but the writer saved the best for last. It says something that the locals have more confidence in the Marines than they do in their own public officials. It also suggest that the Marines concerns about the lack of Afghan troops may be overblown. I susupect that the corruption of police and Afghan army figures has caused the locals to have no confidence in those groups.

The retreat of the Taliban also says something about the confidence of that group in dealing with US forces. The Marines have again shown that they are the strongest tribe in the area.