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Summary The US Marines will march out of Afghanistan by the thousands next year.
US Marines will march out of Afghanistan by the thousands next year, winding down combat in the Taliban heartland and testing the US view that Afghan forces are capable of leading the fight against a battered but not yet beaten insurgency in the countrys southwestern reaches, American military officers say.At the same time, US reinforcements will go to eastern Afghanistan in a bid to reverse recent gains by insurgents targeting Kabul, the capital.Gen. James F. Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, said in an Associated Press interview that the number of Marines in Helmand province will drop markedly in 2012, and the role of those who stay will shift from countering the insurgency to training and advising Afghan security forces.The change suggests an early exit from Afghanistan for the Marine Corps even as the prospects for solidifying their recent successes are uncertain.Am I OK with that? The answer is yes, Amos said. We cant stay in Afghanistan forever.Will it work? I dont know. But I know well do our part.At stake is President Barack Obamas pledge to win in Afghanistan. He said during his 2008 campaign that the war was worth fighting and that he would get US forces out of Iraq.Facing a stalemate in Afghanistan in 2009, Obama ordered an extra 30,000 US troops to the country, including about 10,000 Marines to Helmand province, in the belief that if the Taliban were to retake the government, al-Qaida soon would return to the land from which it plotted the Sept. 11 attacks.Also at stake are the sacrifices of the nearly 300 Marines killed in Afghanistan over the past three years.Weighing against prolonging the conflict is its unsustainable cost and what author and former Defense Department official Bing West has called its grinding inconclusiveness.In a series of pep talks to Marines in Helmand this past week, Amos said the Marine mission in Afghanistan would end in the next 12 months to 18 months. That is as much as two years before the December 2014 deadline, announced a year ago, for all US and other foreign troops to leave the country.
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