Afghan villagers help to make Marjah peaceful

Matt Millham of Stars & Stripes writes that an awakening of sorts is happening in Marjah which is encouraging. He tells the story of Ali Mohammad who begged the Taliban to stop planting IEDs around his house. When they refused on countless occasions, he decided to take matters into his own hands;

Mohammad is among more than 300 men who have joined a local defense force known as the ISCI, or Interim Security for Critical Infrastructure, in northern Marjah. The temporary program, funded by the U.S. but commanded by the local police chief, pays individuals $150 per month to keep the Taliban out and coalition forces informed of threats to security.

The ISCI, which are separate from a national local defense force program with a similar function known as the Afghan Local Police, started taking shape in November as a stopgap to cover a shortage of Afghan forces. The International Security Assistance Force, which oversees all coalition operations in Afghanistan, didn’t authorize the Afghan-led ALP program for Marjah until March.

Hastikhan, one of the first ISCI leaders in northern Marjah, signed up along with two of his brothers, he said, because the Marines and elders in his village asked him.

“The Marines, [Afghan Uniformed Police and Afghan National Army] don’t know who is from the area, who is a Talib,” he said through an interpreter. “Because of that, we decided to join ISCI and make a Marjah a secure place.”

It’s unfortunate for dicksmith that he decided to complain today at VetVoice that we weren’t making any progress;

Killing the enemy is only half the battle, and we’ve been very good at that half. The other half is convincing the population to transfer its support for the insurgency to the government of Afghanistan. Killing more insurgents than any other year doesn’t exactly help when they are immediately replaced with more insurgents that raise the attack rate by 51%.

Not only is it beginning to work, but blather from dicksmith doesn’t help win the war. The only reason that the Taliban have held out this long is because they think they can beat us and the only reason that they think they can beat us is because knee-jerk know-nothings on the Left give them hope every time the Left makes the case for immediate withdrawal for purely political reasons.

And conversely, the Afghan villagers are reluctant to make an investment in their own future when the Left is constantly making noise about abandoning them to the Taliban at a moment’s notice and on a whim.

VoteVets, MoveOn, Spencer Ackerman, etc…are all worried that we might beat the Taliban and make Afghanistan a civil place to live because it wasn’t their side that began our involvement there. All they’ve done is drag out our involvement under the guise of having only our best interests in their hearts.

It’s intellectually vacant to declare that a peaceful Afghanistan isn’t in our interest or worth our efforts at this point, after this investment.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Terror War