I watched the HBO documentary, The Battle for Marjah, last night and would recommend anyone interested in Afghanistan to see it. It is a fairly depressing tale. A Marine company is dropped into what appears to be the middle of a field outside Marjah. They quickly attract the attention of local villagers and others, but are unsure of how to act as they can’t distinguish friendlies from insurgents. Exposed and vulnerable from all sides, the Marines are, somewhat predictably, ambushed. They take cover as best they can, fight back and find refuge in a place that might offer a little more protection than the barren field, namely an inhabited house. The original residents are told to go elsewhere and the house is used as a base to hit back at the attackers. Yet the sense of vulnerability is still acute, as the new base is totally surrounded and could easily be breached.
Within a few days of grueling battle, the Marines actually make it into Marjah’s centre where they, having painstakingly ‘cleared’ the area, proceed to ‘hold’ and to ‘build’. The holding and building only last so long though, because the clearing appears to have been less than definitive and the company keeps losing Marines in firefights and explosions – and with it much of the morale generated during the clearing phase. Forced to retreat, and unable to get either the local or central government ‘out of the box’, the progress initially made seems to be unravelling. Despite an apparent lull in violence, the local population is angry at the instability that the offensive has wrought and seem to have preferred Taliban rule, if only for its predictability. The local security forces are too weak to take over and replicate that sense of predictability, so a local militia is recruited. Problematically, this ‘Home Guard’ are not at home at all, but from another region of Afghanistan, and there are signs of distrust and tension, never mind incompetence. Suffice to say that the final step, the ‘transition’ phase cannot proceed as planned. The documentary ends on a very downbeat note, suggesting that all of the Marines’ hard work and sacrifice seems to have produced much less than initially hoped for. Certainly, this offensive did not ‘break the back of the Taliban’, nor was it ‘decisive’ or a ‘turning-point’ in the campaign as promised by heads of state and senior commanders.
The documentary resonates with much of the fairly pessimistic coverage of the Afghan war and is definitely worth watching in full.
HBO documentary, The Battle for Marjah
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