Lucky for Me I Like My Wars With a Touch of Surrealism

And I wonder how much success we're going to have at 'holding' Marja if we ever actually 'capture' it, if we can't even hold an intersection…

A team of Marine engineers and explosives-disposal experts had swept the route 48 hours earlier, unearthing and blowing up seven mines. But [the] convoy had traveled less than a mile before the engineers discovered a mine on the rutted road. They would later find three more, all planted in the same intersection as the seven mines they found Monday.

[...]

Much of Marja has not yet been patrolled by troops on the ground, and video images from surveillance drones have shown Taliban fighters operating with impunity in those places.

[...]

It appears clear, however, that many Taliban members here have opted to stay -- at least for now.

That may mean many more weeks of arduous house-to-house clearing operations for Marines and Afghan forces in this 155-square-mile area, making this a far more complex and dangerous mission than initially envisaged, and possibly delaying some efforts to deliver government services and reconstruction projects to the 80,000 people who live here.

  WaPo

Now wouldn't that be a surprise?

See if you can read this next excerpt without being struck dumb.

When Worth departed from his Bravo Company's base next to the Koru Chreh bazaar at 7 a.m., he figured he was giving himself more than enough time to make it back to headquarters by 10 a.m. for what was to be the first meeting of shopkeepers and community leaders. Next up on his schedule, at noon, was a visit from Carter, the top Marine commander in Afghanistan and the governor of Helmand province.

By 9:30, his convoy had ground to a halt when the engineers found the first bomb at a narrow intersection. At 10:30, while munching pretzels in his armored truck, he received a radio message: The meeting of shopkeepers "was a no-show. Nobody came."

When Carter and the dignitaries arrived at his headquarters, Worth was still sitting on the road, waiting for the ordnance-disposal experts to defuse the fourth bomb of the day. Turret gunners spotted several men milling about in the bushes, and Worth feared an ambush. To make matters worse, one of the convoy trucks accidentally drove halfway into a canal, further exposing the forces.

The group finally got moving, but by then a group of Afghan soldiers had already raised their red, green and black flag in the bazaar for the dignitaries. The governor and the visiting generals walked around the rubble of the market -- large parts of which were destroyed by a U.S. Special Forces airstrike in spring 2009 -- and hailed the progress of the current mission.

Did your brain sproing?

After the dignitaries left, the Afghan soldiers who raised the large, shiny tricolor pulled it down and replaced it with a smaller, faded one. "It's still dangerous in this area," one soldier said. The Taliban "might burn it."

Now it did.

GARETH PORTER: [If] the United States had its way and created the perfect […] situation in this area of Afghanistan, then the problem would be on its way to being settled. But that, of course, assumes all kinds of things that are contrary to the history of this conflict, which is that you have governments, government officials, and institutions that are effective, that you have security organs, Afghan security organs, that are effective, legitimate, and so forth. None of this actually exists, as has been repeatedly pointed out, both by media coverage and by even the commander himself, that is, General McChrystal, in his report last year. So if you really look at the reality, it's going to be much more of a gray situation than they're portraying, this sort of ideal outcome. And beyond that, I mean, what we're talking about here is expending 15,000 troops for a community of about 80,000 people. Now, of course, it's well situated in terms of its geography, no doubt about that, but they cannot afford to be expending 15,000 troops for a city of 80,000 people. It just does not make sense. If you look at the population of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, it's so much larger and so vast that they cannot afford to expend troops in this manner.

  Gareth Porter

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.