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Politico...
No signs of a wrap-up
in Afghanistan
By Mike Allen
6/6/11
Reuters photo
FORWARD OPERATING BASE WALTON, Kandahar, Afghanistan – The Taliban
around this desolate desert base is perpetrating assassination,
intimidation, coercion – and Col. Jeffrey Martindale, commander of the
U.S. Army’s Raider Brigade, says that’s a good thing.
Martindale, whose base is the tip of the spear of President Barack
Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, sees the guerrilla tactics as a sign of a
weakened enemy: since last summer, his troops have cleared out the
guerillas’ mine-encircled bases, and now they have to strike in quick
hits, often in one-day suicide runs from Pakistan.
“They’re weak, and that’s all they can do,” Martindale told the press
corps traveling with Defense Secretary Robert Gates during his war-zone
farewell tour. “They’re going for the media effect – trying to show
that they still have some power. … From the international and the media
perspectives, it looks like the city’s on fire.”
Media stunt or not, the effect is the same: A whirlwind tour of three
crucial bases shows no signs of the war winding down, or of Americans
getting ready to leave following last year’s successful surge.
Just the opposite: Construction projects are everywhere, and a new
Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits has opened at dusty, searing FOB Walton,
a southern outpost surrounded by little more than tire tracks in the
desert.
“Unless the Afghans become more of a true partner, the insurgents won’t
be defeated,” a top U.S. official in Kabul, the capital, told POLITICO.
“It’s still violent, and the security gains will be ephemeral if we
don’t have get it right on the Afghan side and civilian side. … We have
the density [resources]. But do we have the time?”
And that’s a question that will be in answered in Washington, not at
the hundreds of bleak U.S. bases and outposts that dot this snake-bit
country.
More than the M-4 assault rifles that soldiers and Marines strap to
their backs to go to the latrine or dining hall, all the at-the-ready
stretchers are a reminder of how bleak the 10-year war in Afghanistan
remains. They’re stacked outdoors even on well-fortified bases, and are
lashed to the sides of some of the mine-resistant, anti-ambush, armored
behemoths that soldiers must drive, even for jobs where a jeep should
do.
And yet, commanders throughout the theater are convinced that they are
making progress – so convinced, in fact, that they worry Washington’s
war fatigue will provoke a drawdown massive enough to undermine gains
that have been made since Obama began his Afghan surge last year.
“In the next six months, … it’s either going to stick, or it’s going to
go backwards,” Lt. Col. Clay Padgett, 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry
Regiment, said at a lunchtime roundtable with Col. Martindale. “We want
to push it over the edge, where it turns into an irreversible gain.”
Read the rest of the story at Politico
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