My Share of the Task(222)
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Before dawn on February 13, just hours after President Karzai had given his approval, rotor blades on more than sixty helicopters stirred the night sky. American Marine MH-53s, CH-46s, and AH-1 gunships, Army UH-60 Black Hawks, CH-47 Chinooks, and AH-64 Apaches, joined by Canadian and British helicopters, ferried Afghan, British, American, French, and Canadian forces onto carefully chosen locations around Marjah. As one part of this air assault, two mixed companies of U.S. Marines and their Afghan army counterparts landed in helicopters in Marjah itself. The idea was to suddenly present insurgents with threats from multiple directions, thwarting any Taliban effort to conduct a deliberate, phased defense. Two days earlier, on February 11, soldiers on foot and in vehicles had occupied a series of positions, including key canal crossings that controlled access into and out of the area. Neither day featured traditional prep fires; no artillery or aircraft hammered targets ahead of advancing infantry.
In the short term, it would have been vastly simpler if there had been such fires. But the rubble that the soldiers would have walked through would have been the remnants of the bodies, homes, and livelihoods of the very people we sought to protect. Instead, young soldiers and Marines, from Ottawa, Phoenix, Marseilles, and Mazar-e-Sharif, moved carefully through packed-dirt streets and rutted fields sowed with crippling IEDs and scoured by Taliban snipers.
Many civilians had fled the district, some to relatives in neighboring villages, some to refugee camps we’d established outside the zone where we expected fighting. Most were stoic but frightened by the current combat and, even more, by the uncertainty it brought. Taliban rule, financed largely with drug cultivation, was not popular. But the residents hated it less than the other rulers in their recent memory, namely Abdul Rahman Jan and his sadistic police. Early rumors of his impending return piqued local anxieties.
The first day, February 13, went well. By nightfall, Afghan soldiers and U.S. Marines had settled into the center of Marjah. Initial Taliban resistance was less organized than feared. But, as anticipated, this was just the beginning of the clearing phase. On Sunday, Valentine’s Day in America, two Marine companies in Marjah continued to clear the town, whose roads were thickly laid with IEDs and whose buildings were booby-trapped. The fighting evolved into a series of small but intense and complex engagements, and the painstaking removal of the enemy’s carefully hidden, homemade mines made it slow, dangerous work. Likening it to Fallujah, experienced Marines found these Taliban fighters far more tactically proficient than other Taliban they had encountered.
During the fighting that Saturday, a U.S. rocket launcher called HIMARS targeted a compound, killing twelve Afghan civilians. Initial reports indicated the normally accurate system had impacted three hundred meters short of its intended target. But further investigation pointed to likely engagement of a Taliban-controlled compound that Coalition forces later discovered was also occupied by civilians. To protect the credibility of our commitment to Afghans to conduct operations with their protection foremost, we temporarily suspended use of HIMARS pending investigation. I also directed my staff to issue a statement apologizing for the incident.
To some, issuing an apology to Afghans—for whom our soldiers were risking their own lives, often displaying extraordinary “courageous restraint” in the process—symbolized the inherent contradictions in much of the Afghanistan war. Afghans’ resentment of mission-critical actions often mystified soldiers and those who sent them to combat. Such an attitude can strike the military as ungrateful. I recognized and respected those feelings and frustrations, but I also knew improving Afghan perceptions was critical to victory.
The coming days saw continued fighting, interspersed with signs of success. On Wednesday, February 17, while Governor Mangal was briefly in town, Afghan soldiers hoisted a red, black, and green Afghan flag on top of a bamboo pole in one of the city’s bazaars. As they raised the flag, forces continued clearing other parts of the district.
A week later, on Thursday, February 25, Governor Mangal and Brigadier General Zazai, commanding the Afghan 205th Corps, hoisted the Afghan flag in the center of Marjah. At the new government center, a proper flagpole replaced the bamboo staff from a few days earlier, and almost seven hundred Marjah residents watched the flag rise. The town’s new administrator, Abdul Zahir Aryan, who had been sleeping in the town that week, was in attendance.