Why Marjah matters

As an American who served in Iraq and worked intelligence on the Afghanistan problem for a brief time, I still don't know where Marjah is. I had to look it up. While Marjah is an important geographic location--in the heart of Afghanistan's pashtun country, in the heart of Afghanistan's poppy crops, in the heart of the southern insurgency--these are not the reasons Marjah is significant.

This is why Marjah is significant. We are going it slow. This may not sound like a tetonic shift in strategic policy for our military, but it is.

In the late months of 2001 and in 2002 when America invaded Afghanistan, I was in a small classroom at the University of Washington listening to a lecture by a man from the War College who had helped Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld layout his military strategy. He made a distinct comparison by what we were doing in Afghanistan to the First World War, and it is a comparison that defined our strategy in the wars we've fought over the past decade.

In World War I, strategists lauded a new form of technology that would render the average infantryman obsolete. Field Artillery--dubbed the "King of Battle" because of its sheer violence of action--was it. The advent of accurate long-range artillery would replace the infantry as the primary fighting weapon in World War I. Long-range fires would decimate the enemy position, and a relatively small fighting force would then enter the area, kill or capture any remaining enemies, and the war would be won.

As we know, the Great War did not play out like this. Field Artillery made a brutal war more brutal, and made one of the bloodiest wars in human history. But the thinking that technology could put fewer fighting men in harms way--the same logic invented the machine gun--was a pleasant one. It was patriotic and held in high regard that Americans could invent their way out of any crisis. It was a peaceful, lulling thought, but it was inaccurate then, just as it is now.

At the outset of the Afghan war, field artillery was an integral part of the military outfit, but there was a new player on the field, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV. Armed with hellfire missiles at most, or the ability to range in artillery at a minimum, a UAV could glide over the mountainous regions of the Hindu Kush and kill the enemy. A small fighting force of rangers or marines or special forces could then go in and clean up the remainder. War won.

But in our obsession with making war safer for our troops, we may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, enemies could be killed with fewer troops on the ground, but nothing could be liberated.

What took us four years to learn in Iraq has taken us nine years to learn in Afghanistan. Marjah is our first test in a new strategy. Go slow. As marines creep into the southern city, they are entering by foot. Instead of rushing in by vehicles and scrambling to take the city center, they are going slowly and deliberately. Flushing out snipers is done with counter fires, grenades and mortars. The same is true with counterattacks on ambushes. The UAVs are there, the field artillery is there, but they are regarded as a last resort because the victory is not in killing the bad guys, but in saving the lives of the people in Marjah.

This strategy will take more troops, and it will ask more of those on the ground, at least in the short term. But the surge strategy is simple. It was recommended by Powell a long time ago--overwhelming force. It was recommended by Shinseki too, who was fired for saying we needed more troops. Now Petraeus and McChrystal have the ears of leadership and are telling them the same thing: more troops, be they Afghan or American or British or Canadian. Then we clear, we hold, and we build. Only one of those steps can be done with a UAV. The rest of the job belongs to the oldest branch in the military, the infantry.