I had patrolled in many places in Vietnam (in the ’60s) and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Third Platoon went into Sangin with 51 Marines and in seven months took 27 casualties, including two killed and nine amputations. Altogether, American and British forces each lost 100 troops in the battle and incurred several hundred moderate to severe casualties.
I suppose I have as much time on patrols as any American, and I loathed what I saw in Sangin, because what we gained could not be sustained. Our top generals were preaching a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy based on winning hearts and minds. "The conflict will be won," General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander, wrote, "by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy." Yet by a two-to-one ratio, the Marines in the platoon rated the Taliban better fighters than the Afghan soldiers, and not one Marine believed the villagers supported the government. (See my book One Million Steps, page 244.)
Every battalion commander who served there knew that the Afghan soldiers would give up what we paid so dearly to gain. Yet the top Marine general in Helmand wrote me that I did not understand operations or strategy. We had a difference of opinion long before Sangin fell. The denial, at the top, of the reality at the bottom was Kafkaesque. The 3rd platoon waded through red, crimson and purple poppy fields as beautiful as Monet’s paintings. Helmand provided 70 percent of the world’s supply of opium and heroin. A farmer collected pitch from every bulb on his five to seven acres and earned $9,000 for the aggregate product. He paid about $3,000 to the Taliban youths who helped him, plus a tax of 15 percent. Sangin District was yielding $40 million and Helmand Province was yielding $250 million in farm-gate revenues alone. The value skyrocketed from there, after the raw opium was refined in hidden labs and smuggled out to Pakistan, then west into Iran, and from there to the Balkans and on to the rest of Europe and to Russia.
The Taliban in Helmand and across Afghanistan are tied into a global drug network estimated at well over $20 billion. Of course tribal leaders and government officials at all levels wanted their share. Our Marines were sent to the end of the earth -- the miserable, selfish, mean district of Sangin -- to win hearts and minds, while drug lords in collusion with the Taliban (and too many government officials) filled the wallets of the villagers. Mission impossible.