The meaning of Marjah
By Kamran Bokhari, Peter Zeihan and Nathan Hughes
On February 13, some 6,000 United States Marines, soldiers and Afghan National
Army troops launched a sustained assault on the town of Marjah in Helmand
province. Until this latest offensive, the US and North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) effort in Afghanistan had been constrained by other
considerations, most notably Iraq.
Western forces viewed the Afghan conflict as a matter of holding the line or
pursuing targets of opportunity. But now, armed with larger forces and a new
strategy, the war - the real war - has begun. The most recent offensive -
dubbed Operation Moshtarak ("Moshtarak" is Dari for "Together") - is the
largest joint US-NATO-Afghan operation in history. It also is the first major
offensive conducted by the first units deployed as part of the surge of 30,000
troops promised by US President Barack Obama.
The United States originally entered Afghanistan in the aftermath of the
September 11, 2001, attacks. In those days of fear and fury, American goals
could be simply stated: A non-state actor - al-Qaeda - had attacked the
American homeland and needed to be destroyed. Al-Qaeda was based in Afghanistan
at the invitation of a near-state actor - the Taliban, which at the time were
Afghanistan's de facto governing force.
Since the Taliban were unwilling to hand al-Qaeda over, the United States
attacked. By the end of the year, al-Qaeda had relocated to neighboring
Pakistan and the Taliban retreated into the arid, mountainous countryside in
their southern heartland and began waging a guerrilla conflict. In time,
American attention became split between searching for al-Qaeda and clashing
with the Taliban over control of Afghanistan.
But from the earliest days following 9/11, the White House was eyeing Iraq, and
with the Taliban having largely declined combat in the initial invasion, the
path seemed clear. The US military and diplomatic focus was shifted, and as the
years wore on, the conflict absorbed more and more US troops, even as other
issues - a resurgent Russia and a defiant Iran - began to demand American
attention. All of this and more consumed American bandwidth, and the Afghan
conflict melted into the background. The United States maintained its Afghan
force in what could accurately be described as a holding action as the bulk of
its forces operated elsewhere. That has more or less been the state of affairs
for eight years.
That has changed with the series of offensive operations that most recently
culminated at Marjah.
Why Marjah? The key is the geography of Afghanistan and the nature of the
conflict itself. Most of Afghanistan is custom-made for a guerrilla war. Much
of the country is mountainous, encouraging local identities and militias, as
well as complicating the task of any foreign military force. The country's
aridity discourages dense population centers, making it very easy for irregular
combatants to melt into the countryside. Afghanistan lacks navigable rivers or
ports, drastically reducing the region's likelihood of developing commerce. No
commerce to tax means fewer resources to fund a meaningful government or
military and encourages the smuggling of every good imaginable - and that
smuggling provides the perfect funding for guerrillas.
Rooting out insurgents is no simple task. It requires three things:
1. Massively superior numbers so that occupiers can limit the zones to which
the insurgents have easy access.
2. The support of the locals in order to limit the places that the guerillas
can disappear into.
3. Superior intelligence so that the fight can be consistently taken to the
insurgents rather than vice versa.
Without those three things - and American-led forces in Afghanistan lack all
three - the insurgents can simply take the fight to the occupiers, retreat to
rearm and regroup and return again shortly thereafter.
But the insurgents hardly hold all the cards. Guerrilla forces are by their
very nature irregular. Their capacity to organize and strike is quite limited,
and while they can turn a region into a hellish morass for an opponent, they
have great difficulty holding territory - particularly territory that a regular
force chooses to contest. Should they mass into a force that could achieve a
major battlefield victory, a regular force - which is by definition
better-funded, -trained, -organized and -armed - will almost always smash the
irregulars. As such, the default guerrilla tactic is to attrit and harass the
occupier into giving up and going home. The guerrillas always decline combat in
the face of a superior military force only to come back and fight at a time and
place of their choosing. Time is always on the guerrilla's side if the regular
force is not a local one.
But while the guerrillas don't require basing locations that are as large or as
formalized as those required by regular forces, they are still bound by basic
economics. They need resources - money, men and weapons - to operate. The
larger these locations are, the better economies of scale they can achieve and
the more effectively they can fight their war.
Marjah is perhaps the quintessential example of a good location from which to
base. It is in a region sympathetic to the Taliban; Helmand province is part of
the Taliban's heartland. Marjah is very close to Kandahar, Afghanistan's second
city, the religious center of the local brand of Islam, the birthplace of the
Taliban, and due to the presence of American forces, an excellent target.
Helmand alone produces more heroin than any country on the planet, and Marjah
is at the center of that trade. By some estimates, this center alone supplies
the Taliban with a monthly income of US$200,000. And it is defensible: the
farmland is crisscrossed with irrigation canals and dotted with mud-brick
compounds - and, given time to prepare, a veritable plague of improvised
explosive devices.
Simply put, regardless of the Taliban's strategic or tactical goals, Marjah is
a critical node in their operations.
The American strategy
Though operations have approached Marjah in the past, it has not been something
NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) ever has tried to hold.
The British, Canadian and Danish troops holding the line in the country's
restive south had their hands full enough.
Despite Marjah's importance to the Taliban, ISAF forces were too few to engage
the Taliban everywhere (and they remain as such). But American priorities
started changing about two years ago. The surge of forces into Iraq changed the
position of many a player in the country. Those changes allowed a reshaping of
the Iraq conflict that laid the groundwork for the current "stability" and
American withdrawal. At the same time, the Taliban began to resurge in a big
way. Since then, the George W Bush and then Barack Obama administrations inched
toward applying a similar strategy to Afghanistan, a strategy that focuses less
on battlefield success and more on altering the parameters of the country
itself.
As the Obama administration's strategy has begun to take shape, it has started
thinking about endgames. A decades-long occupation and pacification of
Afghanistan is simply not in the cards. A withdrawal is, but only a withdrawal
where the security free-for-all that allowed al-Qaeda to thrive will not
return. And this is where Marjah comes in.
Denying the Taliban control of poppy farming communities like Marjah and the
key population centers along the Helmand River Valley - and areas like them
around the country - is the first goal of the American strategy. The fewer key
population centers the Taliban can count on, the more dispersed - and
militarily inefficient - their forces will be. This will hardly destroy the
Taliban, but destruction isn't the goal. The Taliban are not simply a militant
Islamist force. At times they are a flag of convenience for businessmen or
thugs; they can even be, simply, the least-bad alternative for villagers
desperate for basic security and civil services. In many parts of Afghanistan,
the Taliban are not only pervasive but also the sole option for governance and
civil authority.
So destruction of what is in essence part of the local cultural and political
fabric is not an American goal. Instead, the goal is to prevent the Taliban
from mounting large-scale operations that could overwhelm any particular
location. Remember, the Americans do not wish to pacify Afghanistan; the
Americans wish to leave Afghanistan in a form that will not cause the United
States severe problems down the road. In effect, achieving the first goal
simply aims to shape the ground for a shot at achieving the second.
That second goal is to establish a domestic authority that can stand up to the
Taliban in the long run. Most of the surge of forces into Afghanistan is not
designed to battle the Taliban now but to secure the population and train the
Afghan security forces to battle the Taliban later. To do this, the Taliban
must be weak enough in a formal military sense to be unable to launch massive
or coordinated attacks. Capturing key population centers along the Helmand
River Valley is the first step in a strategy designed to create the breathing
room necessary to create a replacement force, preferably a replacement force
that provides Afghans with a viable alternative to the Taliban.
That is no small task. In recent years, in places where the official government
has been corrupt, inept or defunct, the Taliban have in many cases stepped in
to provide basic governance and civil authority. And this is why even the
Americans are publicly flirting with holding talks with certain factions of the
Taliban in hopes that at least some of the fighters can be dissuaded from
battling the Americans (assisting with the first goal) and perhaps even joining
the nascent Afghan government (assisting with the second).
The bottom line is that this battle does not mark the turning of the tide of
the war. Instead, it is part of the application of a new strategy that
accurately takes into account Afghanistan's geography and all the weaknesses
and challenges that geography poses. Marjah marks the first time the US has
applied a plan not to hold the line, but actually to reshape the country. We
are not saying that the strategy will bear fruit. Afghanistan is a corrupt mess
populated by citizens who are far more comfortable thinking and acting locally
and tribally than nationally. In such a place indigenous guerrillas will always
hold the advantage. No one has ever attempted this sort of national
restructuring in Afghanistan, and the Americans are attempting to do so in a
short period on a shoestring budget.
At the time of this writing, this first step appears to be going well for
American-NATO-Afghan forces. Casualties have been light and most of Marjah
already has been secured. But do not read this as a massive battlefield
success. The assault required weeks of obvious preparation, and very few
Taliban fighters chose to remain and contest the territory against the more
numerous and better armed attackers. The American challenge lies not so much in
assaulting or capturing Marjah but in continuing to deny it to the Taliban. If
the Americans cannot actually hold places like Marjah, then they are simply
engaging in an exhausting and reactive strategy of chasing a dispersed and
mobile target.
A "government-in-a-box" of civilian administrators is already poised to move
into Marjah to step into the vacuum left by the Taliban. We obviously have
major doubts about how effective this box government can be at building up
civil authority in a town that has been governed by the Taliban for most of the
last decade. Yet what happens in Marjah and places like it in the coming months
will be the foundation upon which the success or failure of this effort will be
built. But assessing that process is simply impossible, because the only
measure that matters cannot be judged until the Afghans are left to themselves.
(This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR.)
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