US launches operation in Afghanistan

The United States has launched a major military operation in southern Afghanistan aimed at getting Helmand Province back from the Taliban. The World’s Jeb Sharp reports that the battle is being seen as part of the new Obama Administration strategy.
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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is The World. The United States launched a major military operation in southern Afghanistan today. Some four thousand marines and 650 Afghan forces have moved into Taliban strongholds in Helmand province. Elsewhere in Afghanistan, Taliban militants say that they’re holding captive an American soldier who disappeared three days ago. Today’s operation in the south is being portrayed as part of the Obama administration’s strategy to turn the tide against the Taliban. The World’s Jeb Sharp begins our coverage.

JEB SHARP: Eight years into the conflict in Afghanistan a renewed effort is underway to win the war. Captain William Pelletier is a spokesman for the US Marines.

WILLIAM PELLETIER: We have inserted approximately four thousand US marines, partnered with several hundred Afghan national security force members into central Helmand province, into the Helmand river valley, to better secure the populace and help protect them from the insurgent and Taliban violence and intimidation that they’ve been experiencing in that area for a long time.  And having this larger force enables us to do things that previous forces have not been able to.

JEB SHARP: That force converged on Helmand Province last night in what’s being described as the largest marine offensive since the one in Falluja, Iraq in 2004. Marine Corps Brigadier General Larry Nicholson said in a statement, “Where we go we will stay and where we stay we will hold, build and work toward transition of all security responsibilities to Afghan forces.” That ambitious agenda coincides with new military leadership in Afghanistan under General Stanley McChrystal. He’s known as a  no-nonsense and aggressive commander. But political scientist William Rosenau of the Rand Corporation is skeptical the approach is that new. He says the offensive in Helmand Province today is eerily reminiscent of the big offensives in Iraq a few years ago.

WILLIAM ROSENAU: We could spend the next 10 years chasing the Taliban, trying to drive the Taliban out using helicopter gun ships the way the soviets did, very unsuccessfully, in Afghanistan in the 1980′s. You know, the real problem is I don’t think we have a strategy for Afghanistan. And if you don’t have a strategy, there’s going to be an awful lot of very painful and expensive groping over the next few years.

JEB SHARP: Rosenau worries that the Obama Administration is of two minds and is toggling between minimalist and more ambitious approaches to Afghanistan. But Rosenau thinks it’s high time to abandon ambition of state building and democracy, and focus on much more narrow goals of finding tribal leaders to arm and pay who are hostile to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. And that, he says will mean finally mastering the political realities in Afghanistan.

WILLIAM ROSENAU: That’s why it’s so important to understand these local dynamics. Who actually has power? Who could rule realistically? Who would be in position to keep Al Qaeda out which it should be in my judgment our paramount interest? These are fundamentally political questions but we’ve been, I think, blinded by ideology that said no, no, no, no, the only way to really do counterinsurgency is to build massive central state with Karzai at the center, that can control events  and can police Afghanistan out in the provinces, its country in its entirely. And I think that symbolizes a failure to accept political reality in Afghanistan.

JEB SHARP: One of the stated goals of the current operation is to pacify Helmand province enough so that ordinary civilians feel safe enough to come out and register to vote for national elections in august. Whether they do will be one test of the success of this current operation, which is also a test of General McChrystal’s new goal of reducing civilian casualties and winning over local populations. For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.

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