Troops Take Positions in Taliban Haven
New York Times
By DEXTER FILKINS
February 13, 2010
KABUL, Afghanistan — American, Afghan and British troops seized crucial positions across the Taliban stronghold of Marja on Saturday, encountering intense but sporadic fighting as they began the treacherous ordeal of house-to-house searches. More than 6,000 American, Afghan and British troops came in fast early on Saturday, overwhelming most immediate resistance. But as the troops began to fan out on searches, fighting with Taliban insurgents grew in frequency and intensity across a wide area. The pattern suggested that the hardest fighting lay in the days to come.
One American and one British Marine were reported killed by small-arms fire, but none from the Afghan Army, whose soldiers make up the majority of those in the fight. Three American soldiers were killed and seven wounded when they were attacked by a suicide bomber on a motorcycle during a foot patrol in neighboring Kandahar Province. A second British soldier was killed by a homemade bomb in southern Afghanistan in a blast unrelated to the operation in Marja. NATO officials said that no civilian casualties had been reported. In the chaos, the claim was impossible to verify.
American commanders said the troops had achieved every first-day objective. That included advancing into the city itself and seizing intersections, government buildings and one of the city’s main bazaars in the center of town…
While I’m no fan of wars, if we’re going to fight them, it might be nice to occasionally win one. As I understand it, this offensive has a dual objective. It’s a Taliban stronghold. In addition, it’s the world center for the Poppy/Heroin trade. Success shuts down the Heroin business, the main financial resource for the Taliban. Since we’ve been there for over seven years, it seems like it might have occurred to someone to go after the area before – but better late than never. This is the first General McCrytstal offensive in what I think of as Obama’s Surge. Afghanistan is actually our legitijmate, "legal" war against the fundamentalist Taliban, sponsors of Bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The whole point of this Middle East jaunt was to do something meaningful about the 9/11 attack on New York, about al Qaeda. Somewhere early on, we got lost – maybe, more to the point, took a very wrong turn. Hopefully, this offensive against the Taliban is a step in the right direction. Anyone notice that our military has seemed more like its old self since Donald Rumsfeld left the scene? Bush was kind of dull. Cheney was devious. But Rumsfeld was worse than incompetent, he insisted on spreading his incompetence all over the Pentagon. Like I said, I’m no fan of wars, but if we’re going to fight them, it might be nice to occasionally win one. Maybe we’re finally getting around to doing that…
Late last night I got a NYT “alert” on this and I went so far. in my excitement, to begin a forward and email to you. I’ve read up on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and have been following the developments of the “Obama Surge” closely. I believed that if we were going to have success there, it would involve putting the right kinds of units to bear in just the part of the country that our Marines and Special Forces are now engaged. More importantly, that this would be accompanied by instant infrastructure, what Gen. MacChrystal terms “government in a box” that will likely give locals the idea that they need not fear the Taliban moving back in and slaughtering everyone in the villages that they (the Taliban) surmised might have even had conversation with the enemy (us). It is VERY encouraging to see that our forces are lined up in the correct region and that they may conceivably march this entire model down to the border with Pakistan. Pushing the dirtbags across the border will concentrate them and should make it easier for Pakistani forces to mop them up on their side and, it seems, the Pakistanis may be of a mind to do just that. I couldn’t agree with you more that this is precisely the job we needed to have been doing and would likely have accomplished 6-7 years ago had we not taken our collective eye off the ball. As for Donald Rumsfeld, alls I got to say is that the guy exerted such a terrible drain on his country that he really should have long ago contemplated some ancient and honorable Asian custom and taken himself out for the abject failure and enormous costs on other human beings that his self-impressed and twisted thinking extracted during his atomically trivial dance on the stage. If he had half the moral fibre of your average Japanese General of naval officer, he would have been long gone and the world would have been better off.
I’m not a fan of wars either – who could be a fan of such insanity?…well, obviously there are still not just a few left who have such little insight into their own and the psychology of the species that they could actually be a fan of wars….but, your’e right – if we ARE going to do it, let’s at least try to get it as right as it can be and protect the innocenti while we are at it.