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Friday, October 23, 2009
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In Afghan farming community, a fragile turnaround
By RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN Washington Post NAWA, Afghanistan - Before a battalion of U.S. Marines swooped into this dusty farming community along the Helmand River in early July, almost every stall in the bazaar had been padlocked, as had the school and the health clinic. Thousands of residents had fled. Government officials and municipal services were nonexistent. Taliban fighters swaggered about with impunity, setting up checkpoints and seeding the roads with bombs.
In the three months since the Marines arrived, the school has reopened, the district governor is on the job and the market is bustling. The insurgents have demonstrated far less resistance than U.S. commanders expected. Many of the residents who left are returning home, their possessions piled onto rickety trailers, and the Marines deem the central part of the town so secure that they routinely walk around without body armor and helmets.
"Nawa has returned from the dead," said the district administrator, Mohammed Khan.
Nawa provides one ground-level perspective into the debate over U.S. force levels in Afghanistan among members of President Obama's national security team. In this district, the war is being waged in the manner sought by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan: The number of troops went from about 100 to 1,100, and they have been countering the insurgency by focusing on improving security for local people instead of hunting down the Taliban.
The result has been a profound transformation, suggesting that after eight years of war the United States still may be able to regain momentum in some areas that had long been written off to the Taliban. Insurgent attacks on civilians and NATO forces, once a near-daily fact of life here, have almost ceased in Nawa and are far less common than they were in surrounding areas, a turnabout reminiscent of what happened in Iraq last year after a sharp increase in American forces there.
But even if Nawa remains peaceful, replicating what has occurred here may not be possible. Achieving the same troop-to-population ratio in other insurgent strongholds across southern and eastern Afghanistan would require at least 100,000 more U.S. or NATO troops - more than double the 40,000 being sought by McChrystal - as well as many thousands of additional Afghan security forces.
The Helmand River valley contains some of Afghanistan's most fertile land, enabling reconstruction workers to improve livelihoods through agricultural assistance programs.
"We have to be very careful when we say we want to use Nawa as a model," said Ian Purves, a British development specialist who advises the battalion. "First off, will Nawa work as we want? And even if it does, there's no guarantee what we're doing here will work anywhere else."
The turnaround here remains fragile. Marine commanders in Nawa acknowledge that their gains could melt away if the Afghan government and security forces do not move quickly to deliver essential public services, or if U.S. troop levels are reduced here before stability is cemented. Many of the insurgents who left Nawa in July have taken refuge 10 miles to the northwest.
"The bone has not healed," said Lt. Col. William McCollough, the battalion commander. "If you take the cast off, it's going right back to a catastrophic situation."
McChrystal has not proclaimed Nawa a success or even cited it in discussions with White House officials as a justification for more troops, mindful that similar assertions have been made in other parts of the country only to have those areas slip back into insurgent control. But no Marine from the battalion in Nawa has been killed in combat since late August, even as U.S. troop fatalities have spiked in other parts of Afghanistan. McChrystal and other senior military officials in Afghanistan hope that what is happening amid the canals and cornfields in this patch of southern Afghanistan is different and can be applied elsewhere. Nawa, one of his aides said, is "his number one petri dish."
Despite repeated requests, the government in Kabul has not sent officials to Nawa to help on issues that matter most to local people: education, health, agriculture and rural development.
Marine commanders and reconstruction experts remain optimistic that the government will start providing services here, but some residents are not waiting for Kabul to act. Last month, McCollough was alarmed by a report of a group of men digging holes along the road from the main irrigation canal to the bazaar. He feared that they were planting roadside bombs, but it turned out they were digging holes for electricity poles.
To McCollough, the project is a sign that something unique is taking root. If residents were willing to invest, he reasoned, they must feel confident that conditions are going to improve. "This says, 'I believe in my future,' " he said.
For the first five years of the Afghanistan war, there were no NATO forces permanently stationed in Nawa. The British military, which became responsible for the area in 2005, did not have enough soldiers on the ground to perform more than occasional operations aimed at flushing out insurgents. When the British left, the Taliban returned.
In 2006, the British sent a team of about 100 soldiers to Helmand, largely to mentor local police and a small contingent of Afghan army personnel. They were quickly outmatched by the Taliban and forced to hunker down in a half-built government office that they said began to feel like the Alamo.
Taliban coffers swelled with protection payments from poppy growers and taxes on their fields, and the insurgents used their wealth to recruit legions of unemployed young men. Some residents openly welcomed the Taliban because a corrupt government and police provided no good alternative.
Then, three months ago, the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment arrived. To U.S. commanders, the change in Nawa is the result of overwhelming force and overhauled battlefield strategy. The combined strength of U.S. and Afghan security forces in the district is now about 1,500 for a population of about 75,000 - exactly the 1-to-50 ratio prescribed by U.S. military counterinsurgency doctrine.
McCollough said the concentration of forces, which prompted insurgents to retreat, allows him to practice the sort of counterinsurgency tactics McChrystal wants. Each of the battalion's 36 squads conducts two foot patrols a day to meet residents and reassure them - often over cups of hot green tea - that they are safe. "We have enough Marines to shake everyone's hand," McCollough said.
But translating handshakes into public confidence remains a challenge. On a recent afternoon, a team of Marine civil-affairs specialists drove to the village of Pakiran to investigate accusations that Afghan security forces had bombed several pieces of farm equipment. When the Marines approached one farmer to inquire about damage to his water pump, he quickly ushered them into his walled-off compound. "Please don't tell anyone that you have come here," said the farmer, Mohammed Gul, a stout man clad in a black turban and a white shawl.
Gul accepted $300 to repair his shot-up pump, then invited the Marines to stay for tea. Capt. Frank "Gus" Biggio, a Marine reservist on leave from his job as a lawyer in the Washington office of Patton Boggs, peppered Gul with questions to help update a database maintained by the U.S. military command in Kabul.
"What's the biggest problem in this village?" Biggio asked, sitting on a straw mat with Gul. In the first weeks after the Marines arrived, the answer always related to security. But lately, the responses were becoming more varied, which the Marines regard as a sign of progress.
"Water," Gul said. "There's not enough water in the canals to irrigate my fields."
Working on his fourth cup of tea, Biggio suggested that Gul raise his concerns with the district governor, who would be visiting with the Marines soon.
"Don't bring government officials with you," Gul said. "They're not good to us."
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