"A Taliban hornets nest that refuses to disappear"

By Steve Hynd

Unlike their American counterparts, Israeli war correspondents - well used to spin aimed at them - seem hard to fool with happy talk. Ilana Dayan of Haaretz has a report from Marjah in Afghanistan, where there's been talk of "big gains" and "militants pushed to the fringe" from imbedded reporters and doesn't see much of that at all.

We witnessed the problems with our own eyes. There is a Sisyphean effort to train Afghani police (we saw one policeman arrested for heroin possession ); to prepare the ragtag Afghani military forces (during a patrol we filmed, one local soldiers went AWOL ); to build schools for the local population; and even to convince local women to remove the veils from their faces. Between one gunfight and another, these are the types of assignments the Marines are trying to carry out in Marja. They are a military shock force and a civil administration rolled into one.

Lt. Col. Ellison read "The Kite Runner," the best-selling book by Khaled Hosseini (an American novelist of Afghan origin). Last Saturday, the colonel distributed 1,000 kites to youngsters in Marja. He gladly poses for the camera with some of them, for our benefit, and swears to me that he can roam around the open market without a helmet or bulletproof vest. During the patrol, however, most of the soldiers moved about with pistols at their hips, a long rifle cocked for battle, and a knife in their belts. I tell the Marine officer that Israelis sometimes talk (mostly ironically) about "enlightened occupation." Almost as a reflex, he tells me, "I am not an occupier."

He barely finishes that sentence before there suddenly emerges a convoy of about 20 unusually high armored personnel carriers, each specially equipped to sweep away land mines. Each vehicle costs about $1 million. That night, the lieutenant colonel would tell me about a mine that exploded in the neighboring zone, wounding two soldiers from his battalion. This would serve as a preview of what happened the next day.

Dayan describes Marjah as "a Taliban hornet's nest that refuses to disappear" and describes the difference between the town itself and just four kilometers down the mine-strewn road:

The minute we emerge from the APC, it's clear that this is a different reality. Here, it's war. Of all that we saw during 10 days in Afghanistan, this is the only spot reminiscent of our years in Lebanon. The soldiers are holding the line. They have no kitchens, just ready-to-eat meals; no showers, just a pipe spilling out cold water. Yet the comparison only goes so far: This war is more bloody and violent than anything Israel has seen in recent years, in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip taken together. The soldiers we'll spend time with the next day are the leading group of Marines in Marja.

During less than half a year in Afghanistan, this battalion alone has lost 13 soldiers.

Read the whole thing - it's excellent journalism - as yet another example of the fraying happy-talk message on Afghanistan. As Joshua Foust wrote last month:

In a way, this was to be expected � as with the Afghanistan War Review, General Petraeus has been up front in his desire to proclaim only good news about the war, regardless of what the intelligence community believes.  But it also leaves nothing but questions about how one could evaluate the current situation in Marjah. Since October there have been very few (if any) reporters to visit Marjah � and even then, they�re not reporting on Marjah so much as peripheral issues like cross-dressing interpreters. While senior officials talk of �progress,� and �shifting momentum,� there aren�t any means by which one could actually say these things are happening.

Every once in a while, hints emerge that things in Helmand are much worse than we�ve been led to believe. In January of this year, the AP quoted an anonymous NATO official saying that the past year of operations has �failed to dent Taliban numerical strength,� even as Gen. Petraeus says the precise opposite. It is impossible to know what�s happening, in other words: all the public data say one thing (the war is either stalemated or growing worse), while most of the top-level officials say another.

With Afghanistan always a marginal national security interest, and becoming even more marginal because of upheavals in the Middle East, we should be asking why politicians and generals are so keen to see the occupation extended, at costs we cannot afford to bear.