Marines to attack Marja soon!

Helmand Town May Be First Big Battle In Bigger War
By Anne Gearan, Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military is openly telegraphing a plan to clear out an insurgent haven in what may be the first major battle since President Barack Obama's expansion of the Afghanistan war, hoping that all but the most hardcore Taliban will sit out the fight.

U.S. military leaders have spoken bluntly in recent weeks about a looming assault on Marjah, a town in the southwest Afghan province of Helmand described as Taliban-owned and operated.

"It's been increasingly clear for weeks now about the need to clear out Marjah, so that's going to happen," Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen told reporters traveling with him in Afghanistan in December. "It's going to happen ... at a time and place of our choosing, but it's going to happen."

The battle would be a keystone in an offensive planned for early this year against a resurgent Taliban-led insurgency. The Obama administration approved the offensive, and an infusion of 30,000 additional U.S. forces, as a way to put the brakes on the Taliban's expansion across southern Afghanistan.

U.S. officials say there is only a narrow path to victory, but that a forceful stand in Helmand and Kandahar provinces will establish U.S. resolve to stick it out. Both sides are girding for a fight.

The U.S. military does not normally comment on the timing or other details of future operations. But remarks from senior military leaders in Afghanistan and Washington suggest they see no point in hiding plans to confront what they said is the last trouble spot in a district where U.S. forces have already cleared several other towns of active Taliban presence.

Marjah, a small town in a farming district some 380 miles southwest of Kabul, is a strategic target because it is a key supply hub for the opium poppy crop and shelters Taliban units thought to have fled the Marines elsewhere in Helmand.

Helmand is the world's largest producer of opium, the main ingredient in the production of heroin, and Afghanistan accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's opium supply. Some of the proceeds from this multibillion dollar trade go to fund the insurgency. Profits also line the pockets of corrupt government officials.

"We're going to go in big," Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, told reporters traveling with Mullen in Helmand. "I'm not looking for a fair fight."

"Marjah is next," Nicholson said, because if U.S. forces are going to protect Afghans from the Taliban - a key component of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's new Afghan war strategy - they need to ensure free passage throughout Afghanistan.

Tensions have intensified in southern Afghanistan as local protesters claiming that international troops destroyed copies of the Quran clashed with Afghan and foreign security forces in Helmand on Tuesday. The tumult left six people dead, Afghan officials said.

Also in the south, 13 insurgents were killed Tuesday by a missile fired from an unmanned drone. The pilotless drones have mostly been used for surveillance, but the airstrike commenced after coalition troops scanned insurgents preparing ammunition and mortar teams moving equipment in the Naw Zad area of Helmand, NATO said.

On Monday, another missile fired from a drone killed three insurgents farther south in the Nad Ali district of Helmand, according to NATO.

During a trip to the region late last year, Mullen chose to fly around the Marjah district rather than directly over it, a sign of how potent the insurgent threat has become there. The area's strategic importance near the provincial capital and a major roadway makes it a propaganda prize as well as valuable real estate.

Military officials said the battle would be designed to minimize Afghan civilian casualties, but the fight, whenever it comes, may involve house-to-house combat and other tactics that put civilians at risk. It is unclear how many true civilians remain in the town itself, although many live in the surrounding 40 miles or so of lush river- and canal-fed farmland.

Although the U.S. military clearly wants to eliminate the Taliban threat around Marjah, some of the big talk may be a deliberate attempt to mislead the insurgents about when and how the assault will come.

By openly discussing their plans for Marjah, military officials risk the possibility that the Taliban will act contrary to their plans and mount a stiff defense that could swell American casualties.

But defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the future military operation, said commanders are banking on the assumption that Taliban foot soldiers may choose to quietly slip back to their civilian lives rather than face vastly superior U.S. forces.

"We are going to put the enemy on the horns of a dilemma," Nicholson said. "He has to decide what to do."

Nicholson said it's impossible to hide the arrival of 10,000 Marines that began last month. Their mission is clear to everyone including the Taliban, the general said.

"There is a certain inevitability to this," Nicholson told reporters as he and Mullen walked through a nearby town, Narwa, without flak jackets or helmets to underline the improved security since Marines confronted militants there last summer and fall.

A small market has reopened in Narwa, whose civilian population scattered more than a year ago and has barely begun to return.

If U.S. forces can flush militants from Marjah, farmers and legitimate merchants will have freer passage on the province's main roadway and the Taliban middlemen will have more difficulty moving the opium crop from farmers' fields, military officials said.

Afghanistan's Interior Ministry claimed its troops confiscated 1.3 tons of opium in one raid in Marjah in 2008.

Marines have moved into strategic Helmand towns one by one since Obama's first infusion of forces last summer. The strategy places the protection of ordinary Afghans from Taliban threats, violence and shakedowns above the killing of militants.

Nicholson said what he called "small-T Taliban," the hired help who go home to their families at night, may walk away while other more committed militants fight or try to flee to yet another haven.

Marines & Responsibility

A Tragedy Of Errors, And An Accounting
After a crash, the Marines set an example.
Wall Street Journal
March 7, 2009
By Peggy Noonan

It is late in the morning one day last December.

A plane is in distress, it's lost one engine and now two and it's going down, and people on the ground hear the sound, look up, say, "That's going awful low," and whip out their cellphones. You could see the pictures they took later on the news.

It sounds like Chesley Sullenburger and US Airways Flight 1549, but that was five weeks later. This was the military jet that went down in San Diego; this was the story that ended badly.

Then this week it took a turn. And looked at a certain way, the San Diego story is every bit as big, and elements of it just as deserving of emulation, as Sully saving all souls when he put down in the Hudson.

It's Dec. 8, 2008, 11:11 a.m., and a young Marine pilot takes off from an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, on a routine training flight. The carrier is maybe 90 miles southwest of San Diego. Lt. Dan Neubauer is flying an F/A-18 Hornet. Minutes into the flight, he notices low oil pressure in one of the two engines. He shuts it down. Then the light shows low fuel for the other engine. He's talking to air traffic control and given options and suggestions on where to make an emergency landing. He can go to the naval air station at North Island, the route to which takes him over San Diego Bay, or he can go to the Marine air station at Miramar, with which he is more familiar, but which takes him over heavily populated land. He goes for Miramar. The second engine flames out. About three miles from the runway, the electrical system dies. Lt. Neubauer tries to aim the jet toward a canyon, and ejects at what all seem to agree is the last possible moment.

The jet crashed nose down in the University City neighborhood of San Diego, hitting two homes and damaging three. Four people, all members of a Korean immigrant family, were killed—36-year-old Youngmi Lee; her daughters, Grace, 15 months, and Rachel, 2 months, and her 60-year-old mother, Seokim Kim.

Lee's husband, a grocer named Dong Yun Yoon, was at work. The day after he'd lost his family, he humbled and awed San Diego by publicly forgiving the pilot—"I know he did everything he could"—and speaking of his faith—"I know God is taking care of my family."

His grace and generosity were staggering, but there was growing local anger at the military. Why was the disabled plane over land? The Marines launched an investigation—of themselves. This Wednesday the results were announced.

They could not have been tougher, or more damning. The crash, said Maj. Gen. Randolph Alles, the assistant wing commander for the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, was "clearly avoidable," the result of "a chain of wrong decisions." Mechanics had known since July of a glitch in the jet's fuel-transfer system; the Hornet should have been removed from service and fixed, and was not. The young pilot failed to read the safety checklist. He relied on guidance from Marines at Miramar who did not have complete knowledge or understanding of his situation. He should have been ordered to land at North Island. He took an unusual approach to Miramar, taking a long left loop instead of a shorter turn to the right, which ate up time and fuel.

Twelve Marines were disciplined; four senior officers, including the squadron commander, were removed from duty. Their military careers are, essentially, over. The pilot is grounded while a board reviews his future.

Residents told the San Diego Union-Tribune that they were taken aback by the report. Bob Johnson, who lived behind the Yoons and barely escaped the crash, said, "The Marines aren't trying to hide from it or duck it. They took it on the chin." A retired Navy pilot who lives less than a block from the crash and had formed, with neighbors, a group to push the Marines for an investigation, and for limiting flights over University City, said after the briefing, "I think we're out of business." In a later story the paper quoted a retired general, Bob Butcher, chairman of a society of former Marine aviators, calling the report "as open and frank a discussion of an accident as I've seen." "It was a lot more candid than many people expected."

This wasn't damage control, it was taking honest responsibility. And as such, in any modern American institution, it was stunning.

The day after the report I heard from a young Naval aviator in predeployment training north of San Diego. He flies a Super Hornet, sister ship to the plane that went down. He said the Marine investigation "kept me up last night" because of how it contrasted with "the buck-passing we see" in the government and on Wall Street. He and his squadron were in range of San Diego television stations when they carried the report's conclusions live. He'd never seen "our entire wardroom crowded around a television" before. They watched "with bated breath." At the end they were impressed with the public nature of the criticism, and its candor: "There are still elements within the government that take personal responsibility seriously." He found himself wondering if the Marines had been "too hard on themselves." "But they are, after all, Marines."

By contrast, he says, when the economy came crashing down, "nowhere did we see a board come out and say: 'This is what happened, these are the decisions these particular people made, and this was the result. They are no longer a part of our organization.' There was no timeline of events or laymen's explanation of how a credit derivative was actually derived. We did not see congressmen get on television with charts and eviscerate their organization and say, 'These were the men who in 2003 allowed Freddie and Fannie unlimited rein over mortgage securities.' Instead we saw . . . everybody against everybody else with no one stepping forth and saying, 'We screwed up.'" There is no one in national leadership who could convincingly "assign blame," and no one "who could or would accept it."

This of course is true, but somehow more stinging when said by a serviceman.

The White House this week was consumed by extreme interest in a celebrated radio critic, reportedly coordinating an attack line with antic Clinton-era political operatives who don't know what time it is. For them it's always the bouncy '90s and anything goes, it's all just a game. President Obama himself contributes to an atmosphere of fear grown to panic as he takes a historic crisis and turns it into what he imagines is a grand opportunity for sweeping change. What we need is stabilization—an undergirding, a restrengthening so things can settle and then rise. What we're given is multiple schemes, and the beginning of a reordering of financial realities between the individual and the state.

The Obama people think they are playing big ball, not small ball, and they no doubt like the feeling of it: "We're making history." But that, ironically, was precisely the preoccupation of the last administration—doing it big, being "consequential," showing history. Watch: Within six months, the Obama administration will be starting to breathe the word "legacy."

What they're up to will win and hold support, at least for a while, until the reaction.

But is it responsible? Or is it only vain?

Anyway, all honor this week to the Marines, who were very much the former, not the latter.