North County Times October 07, 2011
MILITARY: Camp Pendleton troops remain at forefront of Afghan war
By Mark Walker
Thousands of locally based U.S. Marines remain at the forefront of the seemingly endless battle in Afghanistan, including 1st Lt. Sean Campbell.
Campbell is scheduled to leave Camp Pendleton for the south-central Asian nation early next week as base troops continue to fight the Taliban insurgency in the country's southeastern Helmand province, the nexus of the decade-long fight.
Campbell said he believes the Afghan army holds the solution to the war.
"The big mission now is turning the country over to the ANA (Afghan National Army) and police, and getting them ready to take care of their own security," he said Thursday while talking with a reporter in downtown Oceanside.
Attacks against coalition and NATO forces have swelled dramatically in the past two years, and many measurements of the war point toward anything but success.
"That's probably going to continue as our footprint gets smaller and until the ANA is fully ready," Campbell said.
Campbell said he has spent the past several months preparing for his first combat deployment in a cycle that has gone on at Camp Pendleton since 2001.
The Marines, along with U.S. Army and Special Forces troops, quickly were able to rout the Taliban from power in Afghanistan weeks after the war began Oct. 7, 2001 ---- a response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11.
Less than two years later, the Marines would find themselves still concentrated in the Middle East, but not in Afghanistan.
They were staging in Kuwait in advance of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, where their forces would remain at war until 2009, leaving the fight in Afghanistan largely to Army forces.
That changed when Iraq's volatile Anbar province, the heart of the insurgency in that country, was tamed. The Marines returned their focus to the deserts, plains and valleys of Afghanistan, some 9,000 miles from Camp Pendleton and nearby Miramar Marine Corps Air Station.
The Marine forces in Afghanistan today account for roughly one-fifth of the nearly 100,000 U.S. troops there.
Almost all are in Helmand, where the Marine Corps' commander on the ground, Maj. Gen. John Toolan, said Thursday that major offensives remain under way.
Efforts to persuade anti-government Taliban fighters to lay down their arms are largely ineffective, Toolan said during a videoconference from his headquarters at Camp Leatherneck in the heart of the province.
"Unfortunately in Helmand province, we have not had very many reintegrate," he said.
Marine units continue to work in the Upper Sangin area of the province, though "we pretty much have the place under wraps," Toolan said.
One of the units he oversees is Camp Pendleton's 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, which has had 17 of its men killed and 180 wounded in action since it arrived in Helmand in the spring. The more than 600-troop unit begins arriving home next week.
It replaced the base's 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. That group also had a high number of casualties, losing 25 men to fighting. A similar number were wounded, including more than a dozen rendered amputees by roadside bombs.
At least 165 locally based troops, mostly Marines, have been killed in Afghanistan since the war began, according to a database kept by the North County Times.
30,000 insurgents
One of the Marines in the 1/5 is Sgt. Ricardo Ramirez, who lost his left hand when he was wounded in Iraq in 2006. He went on to become the first hand-amputee to re-enlist in the Marine Corps.
"The same grunt things he did with two hands, he now does with one and a hook," Toolan said. "These are the kind of people we have over here, and that's why we're making progress."
The Brookings Institution in Washington estimated in its latest monthly Afghanistan Index report that about 30,000 insurgents remain at war with the U.S. and NATO troops.
The report also says the Afghan population remains neutral or supportive of the insurgency in as many as 92 key regions of the country.
That's one reason the U.S. continues to seek a negotiated settlement, one that few analysts believe is realistic.
President Barack Obama has said most U.S. combat forces will be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, reinforcing an axiom that has been at work in the country since the war started.
That axiom goes like this: "You've got the watches, we've got the time," meaning there is a countdown clock for U.S. and NATO forces, while the insurgency can simply await their departure.
The Afghan government and U.S. commanders place their hopes in the country's national army, which now has about 170,000 troops. Still, defense experts say the army has a long way to go to be able to replace the American troops and their allies.
Among the skeptics is John Pike, founder of the defense monitoring firm GlobalSecurity.org in Washington.
His view is that the Afghan government that replaced the religious hard-line Taliban remains corrupt, that the poppy crop that fuels the country's drug trade and funds the insurgency remains huge, and that there is little to be optimistic about.
"I sure don't have the sense that the Afghan army or the cops are shaping up to the point they can take over," Pike said Thursday in a telephone interview.
"I just kind of get the feeling that we are working to create an interval to get Obama through his last election, and after that we'll pack up our bags and go home and let Pakistan and India sort it out."
Getting them ready
Packing and unpacking bags is a familiar task at Camp Pendleton, where this month thousands of Marines are undergoing training for a large-scale deployment to Afghanistan early next year.
That's when locally based troops resume command of the leatherneck forces there and have the lion's share of the service troops on the ground. Camp Pendleton and command and infantry units from Camp Lejeune, N.C., rotate that duty every 12 months.
On Wednesday, Master Sgt. David Jarvis spoke about the troops preparing to head to war.
Most, he said, were eager to get to Afghanistan, including those with previous combat assignments.
Those troops and all the others who joined the Marine Corps over the past decade knew they would probably wind up in harm's way, he said after being awarded a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for heroism in battle in the Helmand province last year.
"There's been a lot of cost to the Marines," Jarvis said of the decade of fighting. "But some guys still get really upset when they find out they are not going over there. They want to be where the action is."
The losses to U.S. troops stood at 1,685 as of Tuesday, according to Pentagon statistics. An additional 14,342 have been wounded.
Gen. James Mattis, who now heads U.S. Central Command and oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was at the forefront of the invasions of both countries when he was stationed as a commander at Camp Pendleton.
In a discussion with the North County Times, he acknowledged that the Marines continue to face a tough fight in Helmand.
But the troops, he said, have excelled at all the missions they have been given.
"In fact, the Marines have exceeded every expectation ---- from Kandahar in 2001, through the years in Iraq, to today's tough fights taking down the enemy in Afghanistan's Helmand River Valley," he said.
Over the decade, he said, the forces have developed new equipment, tactics and training methods as they adapted to the insurgent nature of the war.
Mattis went on to say the troops are "remarkably courageous" and a "more competent, combat-experienced force than I've seen at any time in my 40 years of service."
'Every second'
Most of the local troop deaths in Afghanistan have occurred since 2009. The most recent was the roadside bombing death last Wednesday of Camp Pendleton-based Staff Sgt. Nicholas Sprovtsoff.
The losses are something Marines and their spouses live with daily. That was clear this week when Tasha Sprovtsoff of Oceanside spoke of her husband, an explosives technician who died in Helmand while on his fifth combat deployment.
"Somehow we had an advantage, knowing that this could happen," she said. "It let us enjoy every second we had together."
As the 10th anniversary of the war approached Thursday, Sprovtsoff, the mother of a 14-month-old daughter and who is due to give birth to the couple's second child at month's end, was at Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington attending her husband's funeral.
© Copyright 2011, North County Times
