Thursday, February 25, 2010

'Great deal' of progress in Op Moshtarak in Afghanistan

Maj Gen Nick Carter, commander of troops in southern Afghanistan, updates BBC defence correspondent Caroline Wyatt about progress in Operation Moshtarak.

He says the forces are making a "great deal" of progress in Marjah, describes how local Taliban have been changing sides and the challenge of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices).

The reality of Op Moshtarak is that it started to happen about three months ago, when we started to shape the environment to get the political context properly set, and the planning in process and to get the population ready for what was coming.

So it has been going on for a long time, and my expectation is that it will go on in one way or another for three months, because it probably takes you that long to get a sense whether or not the population is entirely certain that the Afghan government is making the commitment to it that it expects.

If you go on the ground to the top end of the Nad Ali district, you will find there are a lot of people, and funnily enough they are quite prosperous as it's a very well-irrigated area and they are growing things at the moment. You can get a lot of crops out of Helmand.

And what they are really looking for is security. And the sense we get now, two weeks after we inserted, they are seeing a bit of security coming and that's proving to be successful, and as a consequence the population is more oriented more towards its government's forces than perhaps it would have been three weeks ago.

A lot of it is local fighters who have been intimidated by the Taliban, and local fighters who have got not much else to do, and who are therefore looking to earn some money.

And if you can provide them with an offer that is better than the Taliban might give them, you discover pretty quickly that they come across.

And what is fascinating is the number of people who are coming forward to look for cash for work and looking to do different sorts of projects and to look to the sort of services that their government can produce.

So my sense is that we are making a great deal of progress in Marjah. It will take a while. We always thought it would take at least 30 days until we had the sort of security we wanted to have established in the longer term, so we are really only on day+11 or 12 at the moment.

One of the most striking things is how the Afghans have been involved in it and the extent to which they have stepped up to the plate. Because what we did with Op Moshtarak was put Governor Mangal in Helmand at the tip of the spear.

It was he who made the plan for how Nad Ali would be stabilised, it was he who drew down line support from the ministries in Kabul. My sense is that the governance piece for this has been well thought through, and therefore I am entirely confident that we will get the process of hold happening here.

All civilian casualties are tragic, and are counter-productive for us. Because what we are seeking to do is to protect the population. And if you are seeking to do that, anything to do with civilian casualties is inevitably counter-productive.

You have to be circumspect about your use of weaponry - and that is a huge feature of what has been happening in Nad Ali and in Marjah. There, what is happening is that some very brave people, the ANSF and the US Marine Corps, have been acting there without the use of the third dimension - ordnance from the air - and are principally using small arms.

And as a consequence they have perhaps gone slower than many expected. But that is probably the way you must fight what people call 'war amongst the people'.

It's a multifaceted approach. In Marjah, what we have found is barrier minefields almost on the scale of the sort of thing we used to train for in the Cold War. So they have to be cleared in a very systematic fashion.

There have also been some pretty sophisticated and nefarious sort of ambushes created and indeed things have been laid in strange places - on top of the roofs of the bazaars, we have found IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices).

We have found mosques that are full of IED factories, and I'm afraid this is a feature of this campaign - that the insurgent is using that as his weapons system, and we are getting better every day at how we detect them, and what our tactics and procedures should be.

And of course we are well equipped now in terms of in our vehicles, and our clearance systems, and although there will be casualties, we are getting better at each day at what we do with this.

BBC

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home