American jarheads are either prudently pacifying a swath of Helmand province or kicking out the doors and ratcheting up the insurgency.Depends on whom you ask.
From the distance of the capital, it's impossible to confirm anything firsthand. But the commander of the 24th U.S. Marine Expeditionary Unit came all the way to Kabul yesterday, both to proclaim initial combat success and to quash reports of extensive hardship visited upon a fleeing populace.
According to Lt.-Col. Kent Hayes, the known scorecard reads thusly:
Marine casualties: 0.
Civilian casualties: 0.
Displaced persons: "Very, very few."
Those citizens, Hayes adds, were already on the move when Marines set out to clear key transit routes – for arms and fighters crossing over the border from Pakistan, just to the south – in Garmser district. "I can't even speculate as to the reason why, or where they went. I can tell you that they have not been leaving from any area that we have control over."
While Hayes wouldn't give out Taliban body counts from the past fortnight, the provincial governor puts the figure at 150, most of them allegedly foreign fighters.
Hayes merely agrees not to quibble with that. "As practice, the Marines don't use that as our way of determining success. We judge our success by what our mission was. The bottom line is, we fight them, we defeat them."
British troops, who have charge of Helmand under the International Security Assistance Force – Canadians next door in Kandahar – had not been able to secure that area.
The U.S. Marines, 2,400 strong and many of them battle-hardened from combat in Iraq, were recently parachuted in at the urging of NATO, desperate for fighting-capable reinforcement.
When asked by the Star, Hayes refused to specify what the Marines have done in the past two weeks to push back and apparently discombobulate Taliban forces. "I can tell you what our partners in the coalition have done. They've done very well. But we were given a mission. We've gone out there and we've succeeded. We are making great ground."
Hayes did agree that the Taliban are shoving back hard, which is a rarity since the insurgents avoid conventional confrontations, unable to counter heavy weapons and supporting air strikes. "They are consistently engaging us in small numbers. It's just continual, constant contact. And we're defeating them. What we have set out to do, we have accomplished."
No Afghan troops have been involved in this mission.
Hayes insists the effectiveness of the aggressive American approach is already evident on the ground. "We have seen that they are starting to have trouble reinforcing and getting arms."
Intelligence gathered, some of it from Afghan military authorities, indicates the Taliban are pulling in their own reinforcements from other districts, perhaps other volatile southern provinces, maybe inadvertently easing the threat in places such as Kandahar, though this remains to be seen. "Because we've seen fighters coming in from other areas, the rest of Helmand, rather than from just around Garmser, that is telling us about the success we're having, that we are affecting and disrupting them," said Hayes. "We are defeating the enemy when they oppose us and, when they reinforce, we're defeating them as well."
Garmser has long been used as a planning, staging and logistics hub by the neo-Taliban. Choking off Garmser is the Marines' mission, though some diplomatic – even military – observers have questioned the long-term impact of a muscular offensive that alienates the local population.
Non-verified reports have painted a picture of extensive civilian displacement, innocent casualties and aggressive Marine tactics, all of it arousing anti-American sentiment. Hayes insists these reports are untrue, saying no civilians have been killed or wounded and Marines aren't busting into households that present no threat.
But there is a ... but. "We do not enter a compound or a structure unless we are receiving fire or the enemy is using it as a haven and we have positively identified them as an enemy. We have a very disciplined targeting process that's designed to strike valid military targets and to avoid damage to civilian property and unnecessary loss of life."
UNAMA, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, has sent a team to the area to gather quantifiable data. In the present vacuum of information, the guesstimates of displaced people have ranged wildly. The Afghan Red Cross and other aid agencies claim – without supporting evidence – that up to 4,200 families have fled the region since the end of April, some of them living in open desert.
British officials in Helmand, meanwhile, report only two families displaced, according to sources. "The range of figures you are hearing should tell you how unreliable figures are at the moment," said Mark Laity, spokesperson for NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan.
Added Aleem Siddique, chief spokesperson for UNAMA: "In our experience, early figures are always way overinflated. But we just don't know yet."
Further, "displacement" in such circumstances often refers to a brief abandoning of homes, with residents returning after a few days.
There is no indication how long this Marine-led operation will last or how far south the Taliban will be chased. "This is the start," said Hayes. "We started in Garmser. As far as ending it, I will tell you that it's not time-driven. We will leave Garmser at the time and place of our choosing."