A town of 60,000 souls, Marjah is ringed by poppy fields that are watered by irrigation canals built in the 1950s and ’60s by U.S. engineers. McChrystal chose this location to launch the reconquest of Afghanistan because it is the western end of a population belt that extends from central Helmand province through Kandahar province ”” both infested with the Taliban. McChrystal has set out to secure that belt, starting in Marjah, then moving to Lashkar Gah, Kandahar city and finally Spin Boldak. “It’s where we hadn’t been, it’s where the enemy still was, and it’s where the population is,” says a senior Administration official.
Since it’s an opening salvo in what promises to be a long, hard-fought year, McChrystal knew Operation Moshtarak would influence perceptions, among allies and enemies alike, about how the war would be fought ”” and how the peace would be waged. Managing those perceptions would be key to victory. “This is not a physical war, in terms of how many people we kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up,” he told reporters in Istanbul on Feb. 4. “This is all in the minds of the participants. The Afghan people are the most important, but the insurgents are [too]. And of course, part of what we’ve had to do is convince ourselves and our Afghan partners that we can do this.”
The offensive was months in the planning, and little effort was made to keep it secret. If the Taliban chose to melt away rather than resist, McChrystal reasoned, it would give him more time to set up a robust administration ”” a good advertisement for those in other towns where NATO troops would soon have to fight. U.S. commanders even ordered an opinion poll of Marjah residents: they wanted to know how they felt about the U.S. and the Taliban and to gauge what they might want from his government in a box.
The Marine Corps wrote a “small wars” manual in the 1930s that spearheaded a thoughtful approach to managing counterisnsurgency.
Then in I Corps, in northern South Vietnam, the Marine Corps tried something similar to Mac Chrystal’s strategy in selected Vietnamese villages using what it called “combined action platoons.” It seemed to be working well despite a somewhat negative attitude towards this Marine Corps effort on the part of the U.S. Army led MACV staff in Saigon controlling strategy in the Vietnam War. Then along came the 1968 Tet Offensive and the combined action platoon effort was de-emphasized by COMACV.
The patrol boat units, PBR units, of the U.S. Navy in the Mekong Delta ‘backed into’ its own “small wars” effort as a result of of its interaction with small South Vietnamese militia units manning outposts situated in selected villages along the Delta’s waterways.
Although the patrol boats had oringinally been deployed to prevent enemy use of the Delta’s waterways and to prevent enemy access to resources on those waterways, they, the patrol boats, soon found themselves supporting the small militia units, particularly when they were under attack.
The support from the patrol boats gave the militia units new confidence and with that self-confidence, the militia units along with the patrol boats began to conduct combined combat operations that signficantly decreased the influence of the communist forces around many villages.
This patrol boat effort was effectively scrapped when Vice Admiral Zumwalt changed the Navy’s strategy in the Mekong Delta from ‘small war’ support of South Vietnamese forces to a ‘big war’ effort, called SEA LORDS, to interdict the flow of enemy forces from Cambodia into South Vietnam.