Marines make difference in Helmand
Mission possible blueprint for Afghan strategy
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — When U.S. Marines entered the Afghan military’s operations control center at an airfield here in April, they found a scene of confusion.
Afghan officers were coordinating operations against Taliban insurgents using maps taped to the walls. They were uncertain of the locations of key mosques, hospitals, bridges — even their ground troops.
The war was going badly in Helmand, one of Afghanistan’s most volatile provinces and the deadliest for international forces in 16 years of hostilities. Since the Marines left in 2014 as part of a U.S. military drawdown, Afghan forces lost scores of troops every month and had watched the Taliban march up to the outskirts of the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, lobbing rockets inside the airfield.
Seven months after a Marine-led task force returned, Helmand has become one of the few bright spots in the Afghan war, offering a blueprint for President Donald Trump’s troop surge, which will raise the number of American service members training and advising Afghan soldiers and police from 11,000 to about 15,000.
At the outset, a few dozen Marines moved into a series of low-slung buildings at Bost airfield outside Lashkar Gah, which houses an Afghan army brigade, the provincial police headquarters and the regional military control center. The Marines cleared cobwebs and old clothes out of a storage room and converted it into a mess hall where they dine on military rations or eggs and instant noodles Afghans bring from a local market.
Next door, separated by a chain-link fence, is the control center where Marines have helped Afghan officers replace static maps with Google Earth, plot civilian buildings and ground troops with multicolored icons and process intelligence from the field.
“We’ve seen them exponentially increase their ability to manage the battle space because they can visualize it,” said said Maj. Paul Rivera, a Marine adviser from Houston. “It’s like going from being color-blind to seeing in color.”
The U.S. military’s Task Force Southwest, led by 300 Marine advisers, has revitalized Afghan forces and increased airstrikes during a sustained government offensive that has pushed the Taliban away from major towns and highways and eliminated the threat to Lashkar Gah, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.
While the Marines’ deployment to Helmand took shape in the last months of the Obama administration, their mission encompasses one of the main goals of Trump’s troop surge, which Pentagon officials say is to get U.S. mentors out of large bases and closer to where Afghans are fighting in order to have a greater impact on the battlefield.
“I think we’re doing what’s in the new strategy now, within the capability and capacity we have,” said Brig. Gen. Roger Turner, commander of the task force based at Camp Shorab, a small outpost next to the sprawling emptiness of Camp Leatherneck, an abandoned base that once housed more than 20,000 NATO troops.
One-third of Turner’s troops have previously served in the province, etched in Marine lore for the bloody battles fought here in 2010 and 2011. Some 350 Americans lost their lives helping Afghan forces secure key districts — only to see many fall back under Taliban influence after they withdrew.
The new mission is different. While U.S. special operations forces still conduct secret raids, the Marines in Helmand, like the rest of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, don’t patrol highways or visit mud-walled villages anymore. They advise government troops from inside military bases, provincial offices and operations centers lined with monitors streaming surveillance footage.
That has meant far fewer U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan — 13 this year compared with nearly 500 in 2010, when there were 10 times as many American troops here.
But in a bid to break what Pentagon officials have described as a stalemate in the 16-year war, the Trump administration has expanded military commanders’ authority to conduct airstrikes and deploy advisory units farther into the field, potentially putting them at greater risk.
Trump has set no end date for the troop commitment and Pentagon planners have declined to specify the numbers or destinations of the extra U.S. forces. That is a reversal from the Obama administration, which announced its intention to pull all U.S. troops out by 2014 before abandoning that plan when security deteriorated.
“The enduring commitment to Afghanistan is hugely impactful to our partners, and I think to the population it’s the same thing,” Turner said.
When Marines and British troops departed Helmand in October 2014, the Afghan army and police proved incapable of holding the Taliban at bay. Resources were slow to arrive from the capital, Kabul, and security forces complained of not being paid on time. Morale sank and desertions soared.
Without U.S. trainers, the Afghans could not request American airstrikes. Holed up inside checkpoints, they were easy targets for insurgents who see Helmand as their cash cow: home to the poppy fields that produce more than three-quarters of the world’s opium, the Taliban’s most important source of revenue.
The commander of Afghan police in the province, Maj. Gen. Ghulam Daoud Tarakhel, saw his headquarters at Bost come under a steady barrage of rocket fire from insurgents poised at the city limits.
“We couldn’t even stand outside,” Tarakhel said.
The Marines rotated in with a simple mission: keep Lashkar Gah from falling to the Taliban. They came just as a new Afghan commander was installed.
Maj. Gen. Wali Mohammad Ahmadzai, a burly, nononsense officer with a thick mustache, quickly forged a close relationship with Turner. He sometimes joined the blue-eyed, square-jawed general for strategy sessions over dinner at the Marines’ cafeteria, armed with large discs of Afghan flatbread.
In May, Ahmadzai impressed the Marines when he rode at the front of a convoy of Afghan troops as they fought to dislodge insurgents from Marjah, the poppy-growing town where nearly 50 Americans died in a major 2010 battle. In the months that followed, Marines advised Afghan operations to push Taliban fighters out of districts surrounding Lashkar Gah.
But the Afghans need American support to remain on the offensive. Pentagon officials say the troop increase will allow U.S. forces to reach beyond Afghan corps headquarters and into smaller bases to directly advise brigade and battalion leaders and coordinate more airstrikes.