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August 5, 2012

Honoring a fallen Marine

By Jack Segal ----

Sgt. Justin Hansen, a U.S. Marine, died July 24 in Badghis Province, northwestern Afghanistan; he was hit by small arms fire while clearing a building. His name joins a list of 16 other Marine Corps Special Operations commandos who have died in the battle for Badghis province since 9/11. You can get a taste for what his life there must have been like at a web site: www.levelzeroheros.com. It is a nasty place.

Sgt. Hansen is an American hero. He died carrying out his very dangerous duty in one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. He was the 59th young Michigander to fall in Afghanistan, the fourth this year. Just from this area, we remember burying Tech Sergeant Matthew Schwartz in January.

Thirty-three NATO soldiers and Marines, mostly American and some Spanish, have died in Badghis, almost all of them in the last three years. NATO forces have struggled to get some semblance of control in this remote corner of Afghanistan. We are not the first.

At Bala Murghab, near where Sgt. Hansen died, around 331 BC, Alexander the Great suffered one of his few reversals. The local tribesmen, whose descendents we are fighting today, managed to slaughter one of the Macedonian units that crossed through their territory. Alexander was so angry that he ordered the entire valley burned — every person, animal, tree, every living thing was destroyed.

Nowadays, we don't unleash our enormous firepower on the hostile villagers of Badghis province. Instead, we built them a bridge, fixed some of their roads, paid some of them to clean up their own marketplace and generally tried to bring the population around to "our side." But the results should serve as a warning. Badghis today is arguably less secure than it's ever been in this 10-year war. The insurgents control the countryside and NATO forces operate from small "security bubbles" in the villages of Badghis.

This latest tragedy demands that we ask "Why?" Why did this courageous and honorable young man die? The NATO Commander, Gen. John Allen, himself a Marine, said in an interview that, "We want to push the insurgency increasingly out of population centers into areas where they can be isolated ... where they can be rendered irrelevant."

He assures us that NATO forces will continue to draw down, ending their combat role by the end of 2014 — 30 months from now. He doesn't talk of victory, so his plan seems to be for the Afghan government to win over the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, which it has so far proven incapable of doing, and for the Afghan army to neutralize the insurgency, something we were unable to do in 10 years of fighting.

Somehow this seems like an excuse for continuing a war we have already decided we cannot win. The Afghan people don't trust the corrupt Karzai government, so why should they rally around that government now? They trust us "infidels" even less. They want us out of their villages. They want our planes and drones to stop bombing them. They want to be left alone.

Gen. Allen warns that "We're probably going to see some post-2014 military presence — some U.S. and a NATO presence ..."

Here's a plan. Get out. Completely. As fast as possible, certainly in less than a year, not 30 months from now. Let the Afghans work out their many problems themselves, at their own pace, with their own money.

We've sacrificed too many brave souls like Sgt. Justin Hansen to let this thing drag on any longer. Let's honor his memory by ensuring that he is among the last to die in this tragic and misguided struggle.

Jack Segal served as principal foreign policy adviser to NATO's joint force commander, a four-star general who oversees NATO military operations in Afghanistan. He teaches extended-education courses at Northwestern Michigan College.

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