Taliban to U.S.: “Can You Hear Me Now?”
Will Keola Thomas – Afghanistan Study Group
As signs of progress in the fight against the Taliban, U.S. officials offer metrics of success ranging from small arms seizures and the capture of opium shipments to body counts. But the most accurate measure of progress may be the number of bars on the screens of Helmand province’s cellphones.
Cell networks in the province were shut down Sunday on the orders of the Taliban, who claimed that mobile phones were being used to track their communications. Mobile companies who violate the orders risk having their towers destroyed (two have been burned already), and at present, none of the companies are trying their luck. It is not known when the ban might lift.
It’s completely understandable if it comes as a shock that the Taliban would be able to unilaterally enforce a communications blackout in a province that is a focal point of the 30,000 troop / $36 billion “surge” initiated last year. For months military officials have been claiming “significant progress” in the fight against the insurgency in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan as a result of this escalation. British and American officials recently went so far as to declare that the insurgent leadership in Helmand had been “decimated.”
Some gains in security have been made in Helmand. But those gains are isolated geographically, disconnected strategically, and have come at a tremendous cost in dollars and lives. For example, the rural town of Marjah, a Taliban stronghold once called a “bleeding ulcer” by former NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is now a favorite stop on the itineraries of congressional delegations eager for a photo-op with the backdrop of success. But as ASG director Matt Hoh points out, that success comes at an enormous price disproportionate to its strategic value:
“The U.S. currently garrisons Marjah with two battalions of Marines and Sailors. Two battalions form more than 2,000 men and women. Utilizing the White House’s standard of $1 million per service member in Afghanistan per year, the U.S. has now spent and continues to spend at least $2 billion dollars a year to garrison, i.e. police, Marjah, a rural Afghan hamlet of 50-60,000 Afghan farmers.”
Obviously the U.S. can’t provide Marjah-like levels of security to all of Afghanistan at the cost of $2 billion dollars per farm town, and even a “secure” Marjah is a deadly place. Last Sunday, Marine Corps Staff Sgt. James M. Malachowski, 25, was killed by an IED while on patrol there.
And despite two battalions of Marines and Sailors, a newly stood-up local defense force, $2 billion dollars a year, a government in a box, and all the assertions of progress General Petraeus can muster, the Taliban were able to shut down Marjah’s cell phones, along with those in the rest of Helmand Province, at will.
