Marjah push aimed to shape US opinion
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Senior military officials decided to launch the current United
States-British military campaign to seize Marjah in large part to influence
domestic US opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reported on
Monday.
The Post report, by Greg Jaffe and Craig Whitlock, both of whom cover military
affairs, said the town of Marjah in Helmand province would not have been chosen
as a target for a US military operation had the criterion been military
significance instead of impact on domestic public opinion.
The primary goal of the offensive, they write, is to "convince Americans that a
new era has arrived in the eight-year long war". United States military
officials in Afghanistan "hope a large and loud victory in Marjah will convince
the American public that they
deserve more time to demonstrate that extra troops and new tactics can yield
better results on the battlefield", according to Jaffe and Whitlock.
A second aim is said to be to demonstrate to Afghans that US forces can protect
them from the Taliban.
Despite the far-reaching political implications of the story, the Post buried
it on page A9, suggesting that it was not viewed by editors as a major
revelation.
Jaffe and Whitlock cite no official sources for the report, but the evidence
supporting the main conclusion of the article clearly came from information
supplied by military or civilian Pentagon sources. That suggests officials
provided the information on condition that it could not be attributed to any
official source.
Some advisers to General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the International
Security Assistance Force, told him last June that Kandahar city is far more
important strategically than Marjah, according to Jaffe and Whitlock.
Marjah is a town of fewer than 50,000 people, even including surrounding
villages, according to researcher Jeffrey Dressler of the Institute for the
Study of War in Washington DC. That makes it about one-tenth the population of
Kandahar. Marjah is only one of a number of logistical centers used by the
Taliban in Helmand province, as Dressler observed in a study of the province
published by the Institute last September.
Kandahar, on the other hand, is regarded as symbolically important as it is the
place where the Taliban first arose and the location of its leadership organs
even during the period of Taliban rule.
Nevertheless, McChrystal decided to commit 15,000 US troops and Afghan troops
to get control of Marjah as the first major operation under the new strategy of
the Barack Obama administration.
That decision has puzzled many supporters of the war, such as author Steve
Coll, who wrote a definitive history of US policy toward Afghanistan and is now
executive director of the New America Foundation. Coll wrote in the New Yorker
last week that he did not understand "why surging US forces continue to invest
their efforts and their numbers so heavily in Helmand".
Coll pointed to the much greater importance of Kandahar in the larger strategic
picture.
The real reason for the decision to attack Marjah, according to Jaffe and
Whitlock, was not the intrinsic importance of the objective but the belief that
an operation to seize control of it could "deliver a quick military and
political win for McChrystal".
Choosing Kandahar as the objective of the first major operation under the new
strategy would have meant waiting to resolve political rivalries in the
province, according to the Post article.
In public comments in recent days, Central Command chief General David Petraeus
has put forward themes that may be used to frame the Marjah operation and
further offensives to come in Kandahar later this year.
Last Thursday, an unnamed "senior military official" told reporters, "This is
the start point of a new strategy," adding, "This is our first salvo."
On Sunday, Petraeus appeared on NBC's Meet the Press and said the flow
of 30,000 new troops that Obama recently ordered to the region is starting to
produce "output". Marjah is "just the initial operation of what will be a
12-to-18-month campaign", he said, calling it the "initial salvo".
Petraeus suggested that Taliban resistance to the offensive in Marjah was
intense, as if to underline the importance of Marjah to Taliban strategy. "When
we go on the offensive," said Petraeus, "when we take away sanctuaries and safe
havens from the Taliban and other extremist elements, they're going to fight
back."
In fact, most of the Taliban fighters who had been in Marjah before the
beginning of the operation apparently moved out of the town before the fighting
started.
Petraeus seemed to be laying the basis for presenting Marjah as a pivotal
battle as well as a successful model for the kind of operations to follow.
The Post article implies that Petraeus and McChrystal are concerned that the
Obama administration is pushing for a rapid drawdown of US forces after
mid-2011. The military believes, according to Jaffe and Whitlock, that a public
perception of US military success "would almost certainly mean a slower
drawdown".
As top commander in Iraq in 2007-2008, Petraeus established a new model for
reestablishing public support for a war after it had declined precipitously.
Through constant briefings to journalists and congressional delegations, he and
his staff convinced political elites and public opinion that his
counter-insurgency plan had been responsible for the reduction in insurgent
activities that occurred during this command.
Evidence from unofficial sources indicates, however, that the dynamics of
Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian conflict and Shi'ite politics were far more important
than US military operations in producing that result.
McChrystal himself seemed to be hinting at the importance of the Marjah
offensive's potential impact on the domestic politics of the war in remarks he
made in Istanbul just before it began.
"This is all a war of perceptions," McChrystal said. "This is not a physical
war in terms of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how
many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants."
McChrystal went on to include US citizens as well as Afghans among those who
needed to be convinced. "Part of what we've had to do is convince ourselves and
our Afghan partners that we can do this," he said.
The decision to launch a military campaign primarily to shape public opinion is
not unprecedented in US military history.
When president Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger, launched a major bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese
capital in late December 1972, they were consciously seeking to influence
public opinion to view their policy as much tougher in the final phase of peace
negotiations with Hanoi.
The combination of the heavy damage to Hanoi and the administration's heavy
spin about its military pressure on the North Vietnamese contributed to broad
acceptance of the later conclusion that Kissinger had got a better agreement in
Paris in February 1973.
In fact, Kissinger had compromised on all the demands he had made before the
bombing began. But the public perception was more important to the Nixon White
House.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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