As the New York Times reported earlier this week, the Hold-Build part of Clear-Hold-Build is not going so well for the U.S. in Marja. The local population has not been cooperating with the U.S. effort to capture Taliban forces out of fear of being on the receiving end of the Taliban’s vengeance. As a result, what is happening in Marja is actually the opposite of Build:
Over 150 families have fled Marja in the last two weeks, according to the Afghan Red Crescent Society in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah…
“People are leaving; you see 10 to 20 families each day on the road who are leaving Marja due to insecurity,” said a farmer, Abdul Rahman, 52, who was traveling on his own. “It is now hard to live there in this situation.”
One farmer who was loading his family and belongings onto a tractor-trailer on the edge of Lashkar Gah last week said he had abandoned his whole livelihood in Sistan, Marja, as soon as the harvest, a poor one this year, was done.
This doesn’t bode well for the long-term viability of the U.S.’s current strategy, especially given General McChrystal’s statement last year that:
…once you clear something and don’t hold it, you probably didn’t really clear it. It has no staying power. In fact, I would argue that it’s worse, because you create an expectation and then you dash it. So I think that you’re almost better to have not gone there at all.
Also, two of the most important things to look at when evaluating this strategy’s success are the state of Afghanistan’s forces and the country’s ability to sustain itself economically. As for Afghanistan’s security forces, Marja doesn’t tell us a very promising story. Afghan soldiers looted after the U.S. offensive, and the U.S. had to foot the bill to make up for the damage. The Afghan police force is plagued with many problems of its own. As for the country’s economic viability, the seeming failure of Clear-Hold-Build doesn’t bode well.
It is worth revisiting the lessons of the Soviet withdrawal. As the BBC noted last year:
By that point [1986], Soviet trainers had created an Afghan army 160,000-strong – double the size of the force Nato has trained so far – together with thousands of much-feared secret policemen.
Yet once Soviet forces had left, they could do little more than defend Kabul and a few other cities.
Only massive military aid, coupled with incompetence and in-fighting among the US-backed mujahideen opposition, allowed the Afghan government Moscow left behind to cling on in Kabul for a few more years before finally collapsing.
There were familiar problems too with the financial assistance Moscow gave.
It hoped the funds would bolster the capacity of the Afghan government and pay for projects that would benefit people, winning hearts and minds.
However corruption rendered much of its useless.
Signs point to history repeating itself.
