Marines in Helmand/US Afghan role overall

1) Marines:

HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan - U.S. Marines are crossing the sands of southern Afghanistan for the first time in years, providing a boost to a NATO coalition that is growing but still short on manpower.

They hope to retake the 10 percent of Afghanistan the Taliban holds.

Some of the Marines that make up the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit helped to tame a thriving insurgency in western Iraq. The newly arrived forces hope to move into regions of Afghanistan now controlled by the Taliban.

The troops are working alongside British forces in Helmand province [emphasis added] — the world's largest opium-poppy region and site of the fiercest Taliban resistance over the last two years. The director of U.S. intelligence has said the Taliban controls 10 percent of Afghanistan — much of that in Helmand.

"Our mission is to come here and essentially set the conditions, make Afghanistan a better place, provide some security, allow for the expansion of governance in those same areas," said Col. Peter Petronzio, the unit's commander.

Thirteen of the 19 Marines in the platoon of 1st Lt. Adam Lynch, 27, served in 2006 and 2007 in Ramadi, the capital of the Anbar province in western Iraq. The vast region was once al-Qaida in Iraq's stronghold before the militants were pushed out in early 2007...

The Marines' presence in southern Afghanistan is a clear sign that neither Britain nor Canada — which operates in nearby Kandahar province — have enough troops to control the region. But commanders and troops say the countries are working well together [emphasis added]...

The Marines are known as the theater task force, meaning they fall under the direct control of U.S. Gen. Dan McNeill, the commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan. McNeill can move the Marines to whatever flashpoint he wants [emphasis added]. Most other U.S. troops are stationed at permanent bases in the east.

The Marines have been moving supplies and forces through Helmand by ground convoys the last several weeks, a draining and dangerous task. Some convoys have taken more than 20 hours to complete, and two Marines were killed by a roadside bomb April 15...

Here's an earlier post on command problems regarding the Marines.

2) Role (a column by David Ignatius in the Washington Post)

KABUL -- For many Americans who are weary of Iraq, Afghanistan is the "good war" in which the United States and its European allies are destroying what's left of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That view certainly holds with the Democratic presidential candidates, who talk of adding troops in Afghanistan next year even as they pull troops out of Iraq.

But "bad" Iraq has more in common with "good" Afghanistan than people sometimes realize. Both have evolved into classic counterinsurgencies with a "clear and hold" strategy for providing security; both show the benefits of a military surge; both run the risk of failure because of weak and corrupt host governments.

Soon, the same U.S. commander -- Gen. David Petraeus -- will be overseeing both battlefields. If confirmed in the new post as head of Central Command, Petraeus will have to balance U.S. military needs in Iraq with those in Afghanistan. Given that Petraeus literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency for the military, his oversight should be good for both theaters.

The military surge in Afghanistan has largely gone unnoticed, in part because the U.S. commitment here is so much smaller. The 40-nation coalition force has increased to about 62,000 from about 42,000 in 2006. The American contribution is by far the largest, with more than 30,000 troops, including a new boost of 3,200 Marines just dispatched to southern Afghanistan, the area of the toughest fighting. Last year, the United States spent $4.9 billion on training and equipment for the Afghan army, after spending $3.5 billion during the preceding five years combined [emphasis added], according to a U.S. official.

"Without question, additional U.S. troops would be helpful in 2009," says Gen. Dan K. McNeill [emphasis added], the commander of coalition forces here. In particular, he's looking for new troops to take over from the 3,200 newly arrived Marines when they go home in October [more on Gen. McNeill's thinking about future prospects here].

The success of the Afghanistan surge is clear in the east [emphasis added], which has been the main area of U.S. responsibility. McNeill doubled U.S. troops and spending there last year and added some innovative counterinsurgency tactics using the so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams. These PRTs are building roads and schools and carrying out other development projects to help the Afghan government hold areas once they have been cleared by U.S. troops.

McNeill, like Petraeus in Iraq, has worked to isolate the hard-core enemy from those who can be co-opted. He describes his adversary not as the Taliban (some of whom have joined the Afghan parliament) but as extremist warlords who give support to al-Qaeda.

To bolster the Afghan police, McNeill adopted a new strategy for the country's 40 most violent districts, known as Focused District Development [emphasis added]. Each month, police are pulled from a half-dozen of these districts and replaced by an elite national force, while the local cops are retrained and the most corrupt and incompetent are purged...

And the US is also pondering command structure changes for its forces and ISAF.