Login Here
Tony Perry has a fascinating piece in the Los Angeles Times today about an inchoate plan by the Marine Corps to send as many as 15,000 Marines to Afghanistan over the next however-many months. That would be almost half as many troops as the U.S. has in Afghanistan currently. Wow.
Basically, the Marines have wanted out of Iraq since earlier this year — and into Afghanistan, where the service figures the real action is. The problem is there are over 20,000 Marines in the now-much-calmer Anbar Province, which largely precludes a substantial deployment to Afghanistan, unless — as if by magic! — Marine commanders in Anbar figure the province is calm enough to allow for a shift eastward. And sure enough:
Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the top Marine in Iraq, who met with Helland last week, said there could be a "significant" reduction in Anbar within months without endangering progress made toward routing the insurgency and strengthening the Iraqi economy, political structure and security forces.
Kelly, in an interview, said his views were not prompted by the Marine Corps’ desire to redeploy to Afghanistan.
I’ll take him at his word. So Anbar is secure enough to allow for a larger drawdown; and that in turn seeds the bed for a larger complement of Marines in eastern Afghanistan. And all of that happens to reflect a consensus among President-elect Obama, Defense Secretary Bob Gates, Central Command chief David Petraeus and Afghanistan war commander David McKiernan that Afghanistan has to become a U.S. priority again.
Interestingly, one of the important figures in this emerging plan is a Marine general named Samuel Helland, who runs the Marine Corps component at Central Command, known as MARCENT. Helland seems to take the sensible position that what worked in Iraq won’t necessarily work in Afghanistan:
Iraq veterans should not be allowed to rest on the laurels of their success in Anbar, wrote the blunt-spoken Midwesterner and combat veteran of Vietnam. "Once a mistake is made, the excuse ‘This is how we did it in Iraq’ will not suffice," Helland wrote.
22 Comments
Spotlight
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
Advanced search
RSS/XML Feed
i wonder what they will be asked to do there when the time comes?
An inchoate plan is no plan at all. Not another round of this. NO.
(Juan Cole today and the wonderful Barney Rubin and Ahmed Rashid)
Thank you, Spencer.
Yes, as Tom Lehrer used to sing, “send in the Marines.” Since they repair economies in the bargain, maybe they can be Plan B for Sachs-man Paulson and his TARP sidemen. They can sing “When the Saints go Marching in.” Maestro! Hit it.
imo, it is a mistake to send in the first mef for this job. oh, i’m not sayin they can’t do it. it will be costly. don’t want any more to die there. a slower way is better.
Anyone from the Bush family among those troops?
that’s the thing about hereditary aristocracy… they have little people to do that sort of thing for ‘em
The American Revolution has been lost during these years of Republic rule.
well… to the best of my knowledge, they still haven’t claimed the right to quarter troops in our homes and they haven’t proposed a stamp tax, but, yeah, just about everything else they fought for has been annulled by shrubco.
I still have not heard from the Obama camp just what the proposed mission in Afghanistan will be– i.e., what is the strategy, and is it achievable and affordable?
The Bush strategy in Iraq, if one could call it that, was not much more than a collection of mutually contradictory tactics that kept morphing month by month, with a complete disinterest in the cost (those who dared estimate the cost were fired). Obama needs to avoid making the same mistake in Afghanistan.
Bob in HI
Just follow the bouncing bullet…
What with President Johnson practicing escalatio on the Vietnamese, and then the Dominican crisis on top of that, it has been a nervous year, and people have begun to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. Fortunately, in times of crisis like this, America always has its number one instrument of diplomacy to fall back on. Here’s a song about it:
When someone makes a move
Of which we don’t approve,
Who is it that always intervenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,
They have their place, I guess,
But first – send the Marines!
We’ll send them all we’ve got,
John Wayne and Randolph Scott;
Remember those exciting fighting scenes?
To the shores of Tripoli,
But not to Mississippoli,
What do we do? We send the Marines!
For might makes right,
And till they’ve seen the light,
They’ve got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
Till somebody we like can be elected.
Members of the corps
All hate the thought of war;
They’d rather kill them off by peaceful means.
Stop calling it aggression,
Ooh, we hate that expression!
We only want the world to know
That we support the status quo.
They love us everywhere we go,
So when in doubt,
Send the Marines!
he has said he wants to go after osama. hope after he looks at the reality he chooses another way. what would be gained? revenge?
I’m afraid we are going to be stuck in Afghanistan forever just like the Russians were. To make any progress there they are going to have to eliminate the poppy business that funds al-Queda, and convince the farmers to grow other crops that are profitable and will feed the people of that country. This is a monumental task in itself. All the while we will have to keep propping up the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan just to keep that region from completely going out of control. Killing Osama bin Laden ( I think he is already dead) and Al-Zawahiri will have little or no effect on al-Queda’s ability to operate or it’s popularity in that part of the world.
hope it doesn’t take us that long. sovs took 10 years to figure it out. maybe there will not be enough money to try and convert that part of hte world to democracy and christianity. i mean we got out plate full here.
ON TO CAMBODIA! Leave the gyrenes where they are! Wake up Dr. Kissinger! Rev up the B52s! Let’s do this!
What? You said Afghanistan?
Oh.
that reminds me of dr strangelove. did you see the movie? it’s a good one.
everybody gets stuck in Afghanistan. One of those basic superpower principles. Every great empire with a shiteload of hubris gets stuck there ;-P
Interestingly, China announced last week that they’re not interested in getting stuck there…. guess they don’t have great empire aspirations.
http://72.14.235.132/search?q=…..#038;gl=us
Somehow I think Obama understands that our form of democracy is not a reality in Islamic countries, at least I hope so. Christianity is out of the question. Stable governments though out that region that provided for their own people’s needs, and not be a threat to our own national security or that of their immediate neighbors seems like a more reasonable goal. Then there is always the Israeli/Arab problem that is the cog in the wheel of progress in the mid-east.
looseheadprop up over at the Mothership with another in her lessons on the President’s Power of the Pardon.
I think China has it’s sights set on Africa, where there are good natural resources they can harvest to benefit themselves. I think China knows better than get involved in a religious crusade/war between Christians, Jews, and Islam.
I did. See if you can get Oh, What A Lovely War and especially Privates On Parade. I think you might enjoy them, particularly Privates for the south east asian feel. Contrary to the EmEssEm spin, this is exactly like Vietnam. Just no draft.
“Going after Osama” is not a strategy for Afghanistan; After all, Bin Laden may be in Pakistan, and if not is somewhere near the border in SE Afghanistan. So what would that mission mean? Ignoring the rest of the country? I will be seriously disappointed if that’s all his strategy in Afghanistan amounts to.
Bob in HI
care to expand on what you mean by a crusade/war?