The Marine Corps will send a new task force of military advisers to southern Afghanistan’s restive Helmand province this spring, returning to a region where tens of thousands of Marines fought during the Obama administration and hundreds were killed.
About 300 Marines with a unit called Task Force Southwest will deploy, advising the Afghan Army’s 215th Corps and Afghan national police with the 505th Zone. The forces will work in part from a large Afghan installation known during earlier Marine operations as Camp Leatherneck, but will be based in several other locations throughout Helmand and could face combat, senior Marine officers said Friday.
“We’re viewing this as a high-risk mission that really requires training that is going to ensure that our Marines are capable of countering a full-spectrum threat,” said Brig. Gen. Roger Turner, who will lead the mission. “We’re not in any way viewing this as a non-combat mission or anything to take lightly.”
Army Gen. John Nicholson, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, asked the Marines to replace a similarly sized Army unit called Task Force Forge as it rotates home, Turner said. Marines were pulled from Helmand in October 2014 as part of President Barack Obama’s planned withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, but Afghan forces have struggled mightily since to maintain security against a resilient Taliban.
Turner said the Marines who will deploy are a seasoned, senior force, about half of whom have deployed to Helmand at least once before. The senior ranks of those involved reflect the mission, which primarily calls for advising senior Afghan army and police officials.
“We had to pull very senior Marines in all functional areas to match up with their counterparts and really provide a level of expertise,” Turner said. “Because, the Afghans have made some good progress on a lot of these areas. . . . It’s not a simplistic mission. They’ve really gotten to a point where our level of advising needs to be pretty sophisticated to match where their capabilities are.”
The headquarters will be formed primarily from members of 6th Marine Regiment at Camp Lejeune, N.C., with other advisers coming across the service to fill specific needs.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post ยท Dan Lamothe
Image: Washington Post
