Dig the rhetoric in Spencer Ackerman’s report on LTC Richard Hall discussing the Marines in the south of Afghanistan:
The 2-7’s mission is a training mission: they’re there to get the still-relatively-untested Afghan National Police into professional shape… The battalion operates in an area about the size of Vermont with only one paved road — the ring road at that — across deserts and wadis, where they’re “four-wheeling practically all the time.” (You can imagine the amount of battering their equipment and vehicles take.) As a result, it’s easy for insurgents to plant IEDs, and IEDs have been the primary factor behind the 2-7’s casualties. “We’re not being beaten by the Taliban, per se, we’re being beaten by an explosion,” Hall said. “So we’re aggressively working [to] get the roads blacktopped so they can’t place IEDs.”
I am curious how paving the roads will assist the Marines when their biggest problem upon arrival was the Taliban’s freedom of movement. Blacktop eases movement. And more importantly, there remains no measurable impact of paving itself on IED placement—everything I’ve seen still indicates that even beginning paving requires a certain level of security to be in place already, which indicates that security, and not some magical property of asphalt, is what impacts IED placement. Paving to make the Marines’ job easier, and to speed up economic development, makes total sense… but paving as a security measure is still a tough sell. (If any aid or government workers have solid data on violence levels over time as both security and paving progresses, please contact me—this is not ideological on my part, I’m just skeptical and haven’t seen any supporting evidence.)
Earlier this month, LTC Hall left an angry comment on a a blog commenting on the Marines’ presence in Helmand:
It’s good to see there are still many out there exercising their freedom of speech, and doing so without any knowledge of what is really going on over here. We make no direct comparisions between Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are some basic tenents of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that are common across all cultures. The Marines are very quick and eager to learn and adapt to the Afghan culture and their ways, and the Aghans proactively take the time and opportuity to teach us as we live and work side by side with them. You got a couple things right however, one, we are not social workers, two, persistence presence is vital to success or, as you say, “collaborators” may very well become screwed.
LtCol Rick Hall, CO, 2dBn, 7thMar
I am sympathetic to this: the Marines are not, actually social workers, and most never train to be. But at the same time, it seems the exigencies of Afghanistan have forced them into doing a ton of social work—training police officers, doing economic development, and so on. In all of Helmand province, there simply are not enough Marines—somewhere in the vicinity of 3,000—who are staying long enough to have any measurable, permanent effect on the province. And this is a real shame, as the Marines do seem eager to learn about the culture, and flexible enough to shift tactics as operational needs allow.
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