Afghanistan: Getting the Real Point Of The Marja "Offensive"

Gareth Porter has an excellent piece up on Inter Press Service, "Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War," in which he breaks down the media disinformation campaign on the size of Marja:

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

"It's not urban at all," an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a "rural community".

"It's a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.

Porter is right on, and you should read the whole thing for an idea on exactly how these disinformation campaigns are spread, but I'm afraid in the case of Marja, we might be missing the point. We're complaining that Marja is only an excuse for a propaganda victory while at the same time complaining that the victory won't be worth anything because it's not a city.

As Woody Allen said on a much different topic, "This food is terrible, and such small portions!"



This shouldn't be news to anyone, but Afghans live in rural communities. We're supposedly there to protect Afghans from the Taliban after all. Rajiv Chandrasekaran described the strategy last year in the Washington Post:

The U.S. strategy here is predicated on the belief that a majority of people in Helmand do not favor the Taliban, which enforces a strict brand of Islam that includes an-eye-for-an-eye justice and strict limits on personal behavior. Instead, U.S. officials believe, residents would rather have the Afghan government in control, but they have been cowed into supporting the Taliban because there was nobody to protect them.

Great, so if the plan is to protect Afghans from the Taliban, then you'll want to go where Afghans actually live, right? That would be in "a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds," just like the anonymous ISAF official told IPS.

Big cities like Kabul and Herat don't speak for the entirety of all Afghans, so focusing all of our attention on the major urban centers doesn't do anything to extend the legitimacy and credibility of the government, much less provide security from the Taliban. President Karzai's derisive nickname as the "Mayor of Kabul" was one small indicator of just how well the strategy of focusing on city centers, at the cost of conceding rural territory to the Taliban, was working. That is, not working at all. We also can't discount the effect concentrating on cities had on the Taliban propaganda narrative of western-occupied Kabul (or Islamabad) oppressing the mostly-rural Pashtuns.

In this case, Marja being a small farming community might actually be a positive step. So, ISAF finally went to the population, but are they protecting them? From Military.com:

At least 35 civilians have been killed in the operation, according to the Afghan human rights commission. Spokesman Nader Nadery said insurgent bombs killed more than 10 people, while NATO rocket fire killed at least 14.

Not only are we failing to protect the civilians from the Taliban, but we seem to have killed more Afghans than the militants themselves. Perhaps the Afghans will show their legendary patience, and accept that the government had to massacre 14 of their friends and relatives with rockets in order to have a more peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan. Will they side with Karzai? From the same article above:

"Are you against me or with me?" Karzai asked the elders. "Are you going to support me?"

The men all raised their hands and shouted: "We are with you. We support you."

But...

[Tribal Elders] complained - sometimes shouting - about corruption among former Afghan government officials. They lamented how schools in Marjah were turned into military posts by international forces. They said shops were looted during the offensive, and alleged that innocent civilians were detained by international forces.

But they still said they said they support Karzai, right?

Mohammad Naeem Khan, in his early 30s, said his loyalty is to whoever will provide for him.

"If the Taliban tap me on the shoulder, I will be with them, and if the government taps me on my shoulder I will be with them," Khan said.

So we wind up with the exact same bloody stalemate we've had since about 2002. They'll side with the government, except for when they side with the Taliban. That's not a victory, propaganda or otherwise.

The problem is not the size of Marja, it could be a teeming industrial metropolis of millions, it still wouldn't matter as long as we continue using military force and propping up a corrupt, illegitimate government. Until we have a strategy that doesn't involve violently imposing our pet gangsters' will on the Afghan people, we'll have a hard time even distinguishing ourselves from the Taliban, much less convincing the citizens to take our side against them.

Had enough? Become a fan of the Rethink Afghanistan campaign on Facebook and join our fight to bring the Afghanistan war to an end.

Josh Mull is the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read his work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan.

The "Violent Semi-Peace": Elections in Iraq, Escalation in Afghanistan

This weekend Iraqis turned out in the millions to vote in their 2010 parliamentary elections. By most accounts, it was a relative success. There were very few instances of fraud or polling issues reported. Several prominent religious leaders, including Moqtada al-Sadr, issued calls for Iraqis to defy "the enemies of Iraq" and cast their vote. And by mid-day, the government eased security restrictions, such as the ban on vehicles in Baghad, although security at polling centers remained tight.

The Day After the Iraq Election: “Politics Takes Over”
Iraq LiveBlog: Election Day

Oh yeah, and 38 people were killed by violence and 73 were injured:

Baghdad bore the brunt of the violence, with around 70 mortars raining down on mostly Sunni muslim areas as Iraqis headed to the polls in the second parliamentary vote since US-led forces ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003.

A Katyusha rocket flattened a residential building in northern Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 10, officials said, adding that a second blast killed four when another building was targeted by a bomb.

Eight people were killed by mortar attacks or bombs in Baghdad that between them wounded 40. Thirty more were wounded in attacks in the capital and elsewhere in the country.

That's only on election day. On Friday 14 people were killed, 27 two days before that. That's what success looks like in the US occupation of Iraq. That's what we got for the bargain price of $710 billion, 4700 dead Americans and 30,000 wounded, 100,000 dead Iraqis, and millions of displaced refugees.



And that cost is still rising. We still have more 100,000 troops in Iraq until at least 2011, maybe longer, and every day Iraqis are ripped to shreds by car bombs, suicide attacks, rockets, mortars, and IEDs. This is what a New York Times op/ed piece by Michael O'Hanlon and others referred to as a "violent semi-peace":

As 2008 and the Bush presidency conclude, Iraq has settled into a kind of violent semi-peace. The population-protection strategy initiated by Gen. David Petraeus has been a remarkable success on balance. Its logic continues even though American force numbers in Iraq have nearly returned to pre-surge levels.

So a successful "population-protection strategy" leads to the "violent semi-peace." That sounds exactly like the new NATO/ISAF strategy for Afghanistan, premiered in their latest incursion into the village of Marjah in Helmand province. The Christian Science Monitor reported last month:

Top American officials say the two-day-old operation is going well, despite a setback Sunday in which a dozen Afghan civilians appear to have been killed during a rocket strike. That is significant because current US-NATO strategy puts the protection of the civilian population ahead of killing enemy fighters.

Note that slaughtering 12 Afghan people is only a "setback" to the population-protection strategy, which doesn't mean thatthe strategy of  General David Petraeus --- er, I mean, General Stanley McChrystal --- can't still be a success.

And what is that success going to look like? President Obama's envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, told us last week in his press conference:

McChrystal, yesterday in Marjah, in effect said the military phase was coming to an end. But there are always going to be IEDs. There’s always going to be terrorist attacks. Those happen in the middle of Kabul and, for that matter, they happen in the middle of major cities all over the world these days. I have a feeling, however, that some of the energy has gone out of this approach to warfare.

Just as O'Hanlon predicted, the successful military operation winds down into a "violent semi-peace". Oh, but Holbrooke has a feeling that the violence will go away. Good for him. Afghans will still languish through insufferable violence and terrorism, corruption, and a lack of basic human services (we need the schools we built for military operations) while the US Government's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan basically wishes upon a star that the Taliban will follow his gut feeling and abandon the "approach to warfare" that has led to them commanding most of Afghanistan, as well as huge swathes of Pakistani territory.

And just like Iraq, we're paying for every bit of that "violent semi-peace". The current cost is $257 billion, 1700 dead ISAF soldiers, tens of thousands of dead civilians, countless wounded, and millions displaced, and the price just continues to climb. And for what? A "violent semi-peace" where we congratulate ourselves for only 38 people dying in a fiery explosion on voting day, and only 12 people were killed by a rocket attack for the crime of driving their truck on a road in Afghanistan.

This doesn't seem like a good deal at all.

Had enough? Become a fan of the Rethink Afghanistan campaign on Facebook and join our fight to bring the Afghanistan war to an end.

Josh Mull is the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read his work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan.