Afghanistan's Garmsir is a success for Nato – but its future remains uncertain

Hazarjoft, Dec 23 : The villages and fields of Garmsir lie like a snake across the deserts of southern Afghanistan, the head a cluster of mud houses, irrigation canals and bazaars around the district capital, the body a narrow strip of cotton, opium poppy and wheat twisting down beside the Helmand river towards Pakistan and Iran.

It was mostly Taliban territory until US marines poured hundreds of troops and hundreds of millions of dollars into reclaiming this impoverished corner of an already poor province. Crammed bazaars, reoccupied homes and busy roads are testament to their efforts.

"Compared with two years ago it's night and day," said Captain Devin Blowse, commanding officer of the company of US marines fighting in Garmsir. "Then if you were from here, you either stayed in your compound, left to go to a more stable area, or you worked with the Taliban."

There are probably just a few dozen insurgent fighters left in Garmsir, he added, and the main Nato base where soldiers once lived off ration packs and bunkered down during regular rocket attacks has become a relatively comfortable complex with internet, full-service laundry and two cooked meals a day.

The only deaths on the marines' summer combat tour were at the hands of a rogue police employee who gunned down three men at a gym inside their main base, Forward Operating Base Delhi. Outside, they have barely come under fire.

Afghan security forces, who mostly vanished as violence increased, have returned to take over a string of marine outposts along the 45 miles of river and cotton and poppy fields that make up Garmsir. Civilian officials are in charge of health, education and justice.

As Nato prepares to pull most combat troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, Garmsir could be presented as a model for what it wants to leave behind: violence is sharply down, security forces are actively taking on insurgents, and the government is organising basic services such as schools and clinics.

But the US marines who were the main architects of the current stability are leaving soon, and it is not yet clear whether the patchy branches of the central government and its security forces that are meant to take over are up to the task yet.

The people with perhaps most at stake in Garmsir's future – families who eke out a living from its poppy and cotton – have yet to make up their minds, a reminder of how fragile the changes seem to those living through them. While some have thrown in their lot with the government against the Taliban, officials acknowledge many are staying on the sidelines of a bitter conflict with no clear end.

"They are not opposed to the government but they don't have a good relationship either: they are just farmers, they are waiting to see the result, who is the winner – the government or the Taliban," said the acting Garmsir district governor, Ayoub Omar, in an office decorated with a map of Afghanistan, plastic flowers and several velveteen sofas. "Whoever wins, they will work with him." Few answers

Many resent a government they feel provides little help, and security forces seen as transient at best, predatory outsiders at worst. Dull and dangerous rural backwaters such as Garmsir rarely attract the best civil servants, police and army officers and when it does, it struggles to hold on to them. What little development the area has seen, in the form of new schools and roads, has largely come from foreigners, not the government in Kabul.

A few dozen miles from Omar's office is a village of former nomads, settled on land illegally carved out of the desert and largely ignored by army, police and officials, even though it is exactly the kind of place that could hold the seeds of their undoing.

Sand dunes nudged the outskirts of the settlement, camels grazed on thorny shrubs, and everywhere we received the same neutral stares and polite, shut-down answers. No one had seen the Taliban and security was excellent, although the Afghan army and police had not visited for months.

"I would recognise anyone with a weapon, but I haven't seen anybody," said Maulavi Ghulam Khan, one of the elders of the village, gesturing across the empty space in front of his home. "Can you ask the government to give us identity cards?" he pleaded when the marines asked if they could help. "They say we shouldn't be here even though we pay tax."

Marines suspected Haji Ghaffour had seen the Taliban. His mud and corrugated iron shack, festooned with plastic beads and tinsel and stacked with everything from washing powder to canned food, was one of the few places villagers could spend what little cash they might scratch from their salt-plagued fields. But not in afghanis, the national currency. Ghaffour was away and a son manning the shop demanded payment for chewing gum in Pakistani rupees, cash from across the nearby border where insurgents find sanctuary when not fighting on home turf.

The marines scanned the young man's fingerprints and irises for entry in a biometric database, where they found he was registered under four different names, with possible links to Taliban attacks.

But there was nothing firm enough for an arrest, so he walked away with just a warning. "We're watching you," one marine shouted after him, as he turned his back and rejoined a group of wary friends gathered outside the shop. Rampant corruption

Mistrust has grown from years of watching rampant corruption corrode government and security forces, the cynical manipulation and accidental triggering of ethnic and tribal tensions, and the difficulty of finding decent officials.

Garmsir is no exception, and this autumn the police, the army and the civilian government were all grappling with serious problems of capacity, competence or community relations.

Omar himself is the smart and affable son of an influential local elder who went into politics over his family's objections about the dangers, knows the district intimately and came second nationwide in a national civil service exam for district governors.

But he is officially only deputy to a 26-year old who disappeared to Kabul, embroiled in legal problems related to a team of "private bodyguards" he employed. The missing governor is just the most senior in a group of largely invisible district officials who Afghan and US sources said are keen to cash their pay cheques but unwilling to live in Garmsir.

"Improving governance in Helmand remains a challenge," a US government watchdog said in a recent report that warned the central government was not providing enough support in rural areas. "Corrupt hiring practices have allowed for many incompetent directors to remain in charge of the provincial and district officials."

The Afghan army, normally the most respected arm of government, is at loggerheads with Garmsir's elders because a sergeant attempted to elope with a 15-year-old girl whose father had promised her to a much older man.

Blowse said the incident was a temporary storm that overshadowed the army's impressive competence and independence. But it was a reminder of the language and cultural tensions that can hamper Afghan soldiers.

"They are not too happy about being stationed down here for the most part, and they view these people as inferior to them, culturally speaking," said Captain Andrew Yager, an adviser to Garmsir's commander, Lieutenant colonel Ghulam Mustaba. He praised the army's handling of a case that could easily have sparked violence.

Without doubt the biggest long-term security risk in Garmsir is the police. "I'd say we focus 90% of our effort on the police at this point, because I think the army has gotten to a point where they can sustain themselves, they can operate, they have depth to their leadership," said Blowse.

Just over a year ago, the district commander was taken out by a Taliban bomb, possibly with insider help. After two short-term replacements, a permanent commander arrived with a reputation for graft and within weeks his teenage "teaboy" had shot dead three marines.

That came as insider attacks by Afghan police and soldiers were rising nationwide. This year more than 60 foreigners have been killed by men they were trying to train or support, smashing the trust that is so critical to efforts to build up the Afghan security forces.

Mutual confidence in Garmsir has not been helped by the arrival of the latest district chief with a recoilless rifle, an armour-piercing weapon. The only armoured vehicles in Garmsir are the hulking MRAPs – mine resistant ambush protected trucks – driven by US marines, but the commander shrugged off all marine questions about the weapon's origin or purpose.

Nato and US influence over the police and army is also ebbing as they cut back on generous funds that for years paid for everything from 24-hour electricity to sunshades, in a bid to force an improvement in Afghan logistics systems.

"The last unit that was how they got things done, they were like, 'Hey, we'll give you this, and I need you to do this, this and this for me,'" said Lieutenant David Daugherty, commander of the team advising the police in Garmsir. "When we got here we didn't have the authority or money, or resources to give them anything; all we came with was experience and intangible stuff which wasn't good enough for them, so it was harder to influence them to do things."

The problems of Garmsir are not isolated or local. The police in many areas are corrupt and ineffective – so much so that in a recent poll about half of Afghans said they would be afraid to encounter a policeman. Dozens of district governor posts across the country sit empty. Tactical decision

Even the hard-won security improvements in Garmsir may not be entirely what they seem. There have been huge sacrifices by marines and their Afghan partners that have seriously diminished Taliban influence there, but the insurgent group may also have made a strategic decision to limit fighting in the district to keep up pressure in other areas.

They appear to be using Garmsir as a supply route to more volatile areas such as Sangin, where they initiate more fighting – kinetics in military jargon – said Lieutenant Carter Harris. Some districts in northern Helmand are among the most violent in Afghanistan, accounting for a high proportion of fighting, deaths and injuries nationwide.

"The Taliban seems willing to limit kinetics in Garmsir [because] there are lots of ratlines up north," Harris explained in company headquarters, set up in the shell of an agricultural college built by US engineers several decades ago, when they had more ambitious dreams for Afghanistan.

"The south is desert, so this to all extents and purposes is the border with Pakistan for them. They are able to move men and material north to more kinetic AOs [areas of operation], like Kajaki and Kandahar."

The insurgents may also just have taken a tactical pause to let enemies with more equipment and firepower than the Afghan police and army leave the battlefield.

Where once there were more than 60 marine bases, some with just a handful of men, that formed a chain of security dotted through Garmsir, now there are just two foreign camps, and those will probably be gone within a year as Nato countries rush to get their troops home.

The Taliban already make homemade bombs in sizes that will leave a US vehicle (mine-resistant, ambush-protected) largely unharmed but can rip apart a police ranger. And there are still Taliban threats and assassinations on prominent civilians, bombs in the roads and assaults at night.

Data from the Nato-led coalition shows "enemy-initiated attacks" – the main statistic they use publicly to assess violence – are down from 2011, but still higher than in 2009.

Senior commanders in Kabul last year were still talking about "reversing the momentum of the insurgency". On the ground troops are much more sanguine about what has been bought with foreign lives and money – a chance for the Afghan government, people and security forces to fight the Taliban themselves, without overwhelming odds against them, if they want to.

"They have the ability at this point to choose their future, that has been given to them," said Blowse. "It's their choice from there, but at least they have that choice."

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