Word: helmand
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...days before launching the most ambitious military campaign of the Obama Administration, General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, convened a meeting in Kabul of 450 tribal elders and scholars from Helmand province. The general's objective: to build support for Operation Moshtarak, a massive offensive on the Taliban stronghold of Marjah. McChrystal ran through the military phase of the plan, which would involve 6,000 U.S. Marines and British soldiers and 4,500 Afghan troops and police. Then he described how these troops would protect the town while a "government in a box" - a corps...
After a year of mostly grim tidings from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama could have been allowed a moment of satisfaction. But McChrystal's recounting of the Helmand chieftain's warning ensured that the mood in the White House's Situation Room during the conference call was somber. According to National Security Adviser Jim Jones, who was there, Obama added an exhortation of his own, using the idioms of counterinsurgency warfare. "Do not clear and hold what you are not willing to build and transfer," he told McChrystal, a maxim he had repeated often over the previous months. "You've heard...
...souls, Marjah is ringed by poppy fields that are watered by irrigation canals built in the 1950s and '60s by U.S. engineers. McChrystal chose this location to launch the reconquest of Afghanistan because it is the western end of a population belt that extends from central Helmand province through Kandahar province - both infested with the Taliban. McChrystal has set out to secure that belt, starting in Marjah, then moving to Lashkar Gah, Kandahar city and finally Spin Boldak. "It's where we hadn't been, it's where the enemy still was, and it's where the population is," says...
...what is being billed as the largest military operation in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, 20,000 coalition troops are set to invade Marja, a Taliban stronghold in the country's southern Helmand province. The offensive will target Taliban fighters who for years have holed up with the area's narcotics traffickers, planning and carrying out suicide and roadside bomb attacks. U.S. officials took the unusual step of announcing the mission ahead of time, saying the element of surprise was not as important as reassuring citizens that the Afghan government will be there for them once...
...foreign troops in Afghanistan, but they have the eighth largest national contingent in the country and one of the highest contributions as a proportion of both their population and overall national army. While Uruzgan province does not face a security threat as severe as the threats in Helmand and Kandahar, it is still volatile: 21 Dutch soldiers have been killed since the mission was first deployed in 2006. The deployment was initially scheduled to end in 2008 but was extended by two years because no other NATO member state offered a replacement. (See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal Valley...