‘A lot of blood, sweat and tears in the soil’
mad 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.
In July, with American F-16 jets and Apache attack helicopters supplying airstrikes, Afghan soldiers and police recaptured Nawa, a large town south of Bost airfield. They took down Taliban flags and presented them to their Marine advisors as gifts.
“We have seen some good changes under my leadership,” Ahmadzai said. “Generals who weren’t capable of doing the job were removed. And because the Marines have come back and supported us, we have been able to clear all the main roads in the province.”
The provincial government has begun to reopen schools and clinics in Nawa. Unlike in the past, when Marines tried to install basic social services in liberated districts, commanders are leaving governance to Afghan officials.
“The focus is security and defeating the Taliban,” said Col. Matthew Reid, the task force’s deputy commander. “[Fixing] governance, corruption, narcotics — that comes later. First you need to win the fight.”
By aggressively attacking the Taliban, Reid said, the Afghans suffer fewer casualties. In the month ending Sept. 21, 36 Afghan soldiers in the Helmand-based corps were killed, the lowest total for that month in five years.
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.
Advisors have also helped the Afghans make better use of their burgeoning air assets, including surveillance drones.
One recent morning, two convoys of Afghan security forces traveling south toward Lashkar Gah came under fire from a house inside the village of Malgir. Inside a windowless, highceilinged room at an operations center near Shorab, Marines, Afghan officers and American civilian contractors watched footage from a U.S.-made ScanEagle drone hovering above the village.
Once Afghan troops in the area determined the shooters’ location and that there were no civilians nearby, officers in the control room requested airstrikes, which were carried out by U.S. Apache helicopters. One of the shooters was killed, two were wounded and two escaped, said Afghan army Maj. Abdul Wakil.
“If it’s a steady target, we can use an Afghan aircraft to strike them,” Wakil said. “If they are moving targets, we can use our Apaches.”
He shot a glance at the Marine major next to him and corrected himself: “I mean, the American Apaches.”
Afghans attribute their recent successes to the Marines. At a training facility outside Shorab, as recruits practiced infantry maneuvers in a dirt field, instructor Mir Ahmad Malangzai said that after he was injured in a roadside bomb blast last year, Americans trained him to teach a course in detecting explosives.
“It’s with the Marines’ support and cooperation that we’ve reached this level,” Malangzai said. “If they leave again, things will 100% be reversed.”
Commanders acknowledge that the task force’s young Marines, in particular, would rather be fighting insurgents themselves.
Marine Sgt. Andrew Comtois, advisor to Helmand’s fledgling sniper training program, served three tours in Iraq and deployed to Sangin in 2013, when Marines were beginning to pull back to Leatherneck. On his wrist, he wore a bracelet bearing the names of four friends who had been killed in Afghanistan.
“Being a sniper and being passionate, I would love to be back out there on the front lines fighting,” Comtois said. “But it’s not our fight anymore.”
He watched as a young Afghan soldier lay on the ground behind a rifle, aiming at a target painted on a trash can 110 yards away. When he arrived in Helmand last month, Comtois found that sniper students were given only 20 rounds of ammunition with which to practice, the result of supply shortages. Sometimes instructors didn’t set up targets, leaving students to aim their mock weapon into thin air.
“It’s a new process for them,” he said. “They’re still getting that discipline.”
Task force commanders expect that when they complete their deployment in early 2018, a larger group of Marines will follow.
“We’ve got a lot of blood, sweat and tears in the soil, a lot invested here,” Reid said. “If there’s a long-term strategy for Helmand to ensure that it’s a secure province where terrorists don’t have safe haven, the Marine Corps wants to be part of that solution.”