Carlotta Gall kind of buried the lede here:
HAZARJOFT, Afghanistan — United States marines pushed the Taliban out of this village and the surrounding district in southern Helmand Province so quickly in recent weeks that they called the operation a “catastrophic success.”
Yet, NATO troops had conducted similar operations here in 2006 and 2007, and the Taliban had returned soon after they left. The marines, drawing on lessons from Iraq, say they know what to do to keep the Taliban at bay if they are given the time…
But Company C served in Anbar Province, once one of the most intractably violent areas of Iraq, which quieted last year under a new strategy of empowering local groups called Awakening Councils, which now provide security. The marines were confident they could put that experience to good use here.
Only when you win over a critical balance of the local population and empower them to stand up to the insurgents can you turn the situation around, several marines said.
First Lt. Mark Matzke led a platoon for nine months last year in the Anbar city of Ramadi, where he said he got to know every character in a small neighborhood, both the troublemakers and the power brokers. But it was only when he sneaked in after dark and listened to people’s grievances in private that he was able to work out a strategy for protecting them from the insurgents.
While the Marines seem to be aware of the “hold” part of the COIN strategy, “Clear Hold Build,” there is little evidence they really stick to that crucial middle step. This could be mostly a problem of manpower—that nasty, persistent problem of under-resourcing: there simply are not enough Marines to do much in an area the size of Helmand. But it also speaks to a critical weakness of the effort in Afghanistan: with troops spread so thinly, it is nearly impossible to respond to wide scale security incidents while also maintaining sufficient force to keep areas cleared so that reconstruction can begin.
Worse still, there is no indication the Marines understand enough about southern Pashtun culture to replicate their success in Anbar. For one, Helmand is not Anbar. Pashtuns are not organized into rigid hierarchical tribes the same way many Arab societies are (this was a painful lesson the British had to learn in the 19th century, when they coopted the tribal leadership of the Balochi but they found no traction in purchasing the loyalties of the Maliks or Lashgars of the Waziri or Mehsuds).
Taken more broadly, the attempt to replicate Anbar in Helmand poses many problems: in Anbar, the tribes rose up on their own, using their own militias against AQI. There is little evidence the local tribal structures in Lashkar Gah and Garmser are as structured as the Anbar tribes, and there is no evidence the Arbaki groups in the area are coherent enough to pose a consistent anti-Taliban front like the tribal militias did in Anbar.
While, according to Gall, the locals remain nervous about how long the pitiful few Marines in Helmand can remain in one place, the Marines are bragging about creating a security cordon—i.e. a quarantine—around Garmser, just like they did around Ramadi. The locals, meanwhile, complain of insufficient ANA numbers nearby, the uncontrolled border, and the very real possibility that the moment some militant group makes a grab at another town or district center, the Marines will abandon them.
They’re forgetting that the hold must be priority number 1, just as they’re forgetting their presence in Anbar was incidental to the Awakening. You can play off a grassroots revivalist movement, even encourage it to work toward your ends, but you cannot invent it as a foreign invader (it is helpful to remember that no matter our intentions, we are still foreign invaders to Afghanistan).
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust