Alfred de Montesquiou has reported on Excite.com, US Marines launch large offensive
KABUL (AP) - U.S. Marines and Afghan troops Friday launched the first offensive since President Barack Obama announced an American troop surge, striking against Taliban communications and supply lines in a southern insurgent stronghold, a military spokesman said.
The name of this maneuver is
Cobra's Anger
The name of the game speaks for itself.
Follow me over the fold to learn more about an Afghan town called Now-Zad, a village that was literally destroyed in order to "save" it.
Montesquiou's story explains that
Zad used to be one of the largest towns in Helmand province, the center of Afghanistan's lucrative opium poppy growing industry.
However, three years of fighting have chased away Now Zad's 30,000 inhabitants, leaving the once-thriving market and commercial area a ghost town.
British troops who were once stationed there left graffiti dubbing the town "Apocalypse Now-Zad," a play on the title of the 1979 Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now.
This is Naw Zad, 2006:
This link provides a slide show of American forces patrolling the town of Now-Zad.
U.S. Marines patrol through the mud on April 1, 2009 in Now Zad in Helmand province Afghanistan. Taliban have buried IEDs throughout the abandoned city, and U.S. forces there patrol through unpaved areas behind a mine sweeper in single file or "Ranger file" to avoid stepping on them. The military says the civilian population fled the city during previous fighting, leaving a ghost town, now a battle ground between Taliban fighters and U.S. Marines from Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment.
In the May 23, 2009 Wall Street Journal article, Stalemate, Michael M. Phillips describes Now-Zad:
Abandoned by its residents, this mud-brick ghost town is a corner of Afghanistan that might be forever Flanders. There are no schools being painted, no roads paved, no clinics built. There is no Afghan army, no Afghan government at all. In Now Zad, there is just one company of U.S. Marines slugging it out across no man’s land with equally determined militants. From their entrenched lines, neither side is strong enough to prevail.
Now-Zad is
For the U.S., it’s a prize too valuable to lose, not valuable enough to win.
The U.S. and NATO-led coalition has easily defeated the Taliban in battle, but struggled to prevent insurgents returning to towns and villages across the country.
This last quote is significant. After reading the history of Afghanistan in an excellent diary here on the DailyKos, History for Kossacks: Afghanistan & the Great Game by Unitary Moonbat, this past weekend, it's clear that the difficulty in preventing "insurgents," as we call them, from returning to towns and villages across Afghanistan is how empires over the centuries have been defeated by Afghanis determined to rid themselves of outsiders.
The WSJ article stated that
A single company of U.S. Marines is slugging it out with the Taliban in Afghanistan’s toughest ghost town. The battle shows how limited troop numbers have hurt the war—and why the U.S. is changing its strategy.
However, the battle does not definitively show how limited troop numbers have hurt the war. This is just a hypothesis, not a proven fact, which shows that the journalist overstepped his bounds as reporter and into the realm of propagandist to support the opinion that limited troop numbers have hurt the war to win hearts and minds for the surge.
It's very difficult, if you believe that this escalation is wrong, to convince Americans who have been presented biased opinions favoring the surge as fact.
The fact that Now-Zad is a ghost town speaks for itself.
The journalist concludes:
As part of President Barack Obama’s Afghan "surge," the military has ordered 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total to around 60,000. The beefed-up force is a central element of the military’s new counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan, which aims to replicate the successes of the Bush surge in Iraq, in particular the way it was able to both "clear" important areas of insurgents and "hold" the territory long enough for the government to solidify its position.
However, this analysis ignores the fact that the Iraq "surge" ethnically cleansed regions of Iraq just as the fighting in Now-Zad cleansed the town of its inhabitants. The notion that the Iraq "surge" was a success is debatable. How can one call a region, in which entire neighborhoods have been abandoned, a triumph? Unless the goal is to displace the populace, how can we possibly rationalize the negative outcomes of these surges as "finishing the job"?
It's sad that the best minds in the U.S. military haven't understood this concept and are advising our President to dive into a quagmire with 30,000 additional pairs of boots. There is historical precedent that this is a war without end.
The broken down streets of Now-Zad and towns across America that are gradually dying, too, with boarded up, abandoned homes, and citizens left homeless are sad testimonies to the folly of escalating a well proven mistake. Our country is being bankrupted by this policy of war being the answer, instead of calm, judicious humanitarian aid here and abroad. Indeed, there are consequences to not learning the lessons of history and repeating the same grave errors of empires before us, who were practically bankrupted by pursuing this same folly, never to rise again.
It's deja vu all over again: Viet Nam. Our nation was rich enough then to absorb the cost of that mistake to recover, but, now, we no longer have as much of a safety margin to afford throwing good money after bad.
The following are additional excerpts from the WSJ article that are thought provoking.
Matthew Nolen, a 27-year-old Navy corpsman from Memphis, Tenn., insists that each man on his patrols carry two Velcro tourniquets. The assumption is that if a Marine steps on a mine, he’ll likely lose both legs at once, and the corpsman will have two arterial bleeds to stem. Some infantrymen wear tourniquets loose around their ankles, like bracelets, so they can get at them quickly.
"Whatever we take, we do not want to cede back to the Taliban," British Brig. Gen. David Hook, the coalition’s deputy commander for operations in southern Afghanistan, said during a brief visit to Now Zad this month. "What kind of message would it send?"
"I guess way back in the day this used to be a thriving town," said Lance Cpl. Raymond Cardona, 20, from Ormond Beach, Fla., sharpening his fighting knife recently in a guard post built on the ruins of a small store. He and Lance Cpl. Daniel Wescovich manned a machine-gun-like grenade launcher that can spew explosives into Now Zad at a rate of hundreds per minute.
In the street below, sheet-metal shutters creaked and wooden doors rattled in abandoned storefronts, their facades divoted by bullets. Black-blue swallows dodged among swaying strips of awning. Electric poles stood, leaned or reclined, their wires drooping to the streets.
Lance Cpl. Cardona pointed across the street to a forlorn mud building with a blue sign crudely depicting a cut-away drawing of a molar. The sign identified it as the workplace of Dr. Mohamad Zaher Zahin. "That there was a dentist’s office," Lance Cpl. Cardona said. "Down on the hardball is a doctor’s office."
Thus, whatever it takes, a soldier's losing both legs at once, or a town's loss of all of its citizens, we will not cede a ghost town back to the Taliban. With reasoning such as this prevailing, no wonder Afghanistan is once again the graveyard of which Kipling wrote.