Will the U.S. Take Marjah?

The next week will see the beginning of a troop surge to take Marjah in AfghanistanThe U.S. Marines are planning a major operation in the next few days. This is the first push of the 30,000 troops that President Obama sent over to Afghanistan as part of the surge to make a dent in the Taliban resistance. The hope is that this will 1) take out a lot of the Taliban resistance, and 2) get some of the Taliban resistors to come out of the mountains and surrender. Or at least consider Afghan President Karzai’s idea to have a meeting of the elders and figure this whole thing out like, well, the elders would do.

"The people every day ask the government for help. The elders who I contact, educated people, influential people, every day they ask the government to come and make contact and remove the terrorists. Large numbers of (Taliban) are in Marjah. The people of Marjah are under the control and pressure of the Taliban, they cannot so far have much contact with the government," Haji Zair, District Governor of Marjah, where the last stronghold of the Taliban is.

And so the Marines will storm. Hopefully it is the decisive blow that the Obama administration needs. And hopefully after that decisive blow is struck the Afghan government can take control in an equally decisive way.

Through air-dropped leaflets, radio broadcasts and meetings with tribal elders the message that the effort to secure Marjah has been disseminated. I expect to use the word “Marjah” many times in the coming weeks, as this will be a tone-setting push for the military and the West in general in the fight against terrorism, even though the Taliban are not al Qaeda.

Marjah is a town composed of networking desert irrigation canals built, in fact, with U.S. money decades ago. There, the Taliban governs around 75,000-100,000 people, and so the NATO and U.S. push will be an attempt to take back the last area where the Taliban has any major influence over the people of Afghanistan.

The effort will also be the largest for the Afghan army, and is a bit of a testing ground for them. And hopefully, if all goes well, it will be a recruiting tool for the army, to bring some of those in and around Marjah into the force.

"If what we're doing today does not involves Afghan forces tomorrow, what are you doing here? If everything we're doing here helps prepare them, that's the right way to go," said Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, commander of southern Afghanistan U.S. Marines.

Nicholson also emphasized that because they are coming in, many of the leaders within Marjah are thinking about talking with, aiding or perhaps joining the U.S. and NATO cause.

"Because of the inevitability of the operation ... people have decided that they want to talk. There's a lot of influential people ... they don't want to be on the wrong side of this operation when it flips. When the Afghan flag's flying over Marjah they don't want to be seen as Taliban sympathizers or pariahs, they still want to be seen as people of import.”

Photo Credit: The U.S. Army (via Flickr under CCL)