US, British forces bicker over Afghan strategy

The disagreements among the supposed allies are almost as frequent as firefights with insurgents. The Americans contend that the British forces they replaced this spring were too complacent in dealing with the Taliban. The British maintain the Americans are too aggressive and that they are compromising hard-fought security gains by pushing into irrelevant places and overextending themselves.

“They were here for four years,’’ one field-grade Marine officer huffed about the British military. “What did they do?’’

“They’ve been in Musa Qala for four months,’’ a British civilian in Helmand said of the Marines. “The situation up there has gotten worse, not better.’’

The disputes here, which also extend to the pace of reconstruction projects and the embrace of a former warlord who has become the police chief, illuminate the tensions that are flaring as US forces surge into parts of southern Afghanistan that had once been the almost exclusive domain of NATO allies.

There are now about 20,000 US troops in Helmand; the 10,000 British soldiers who once roamed the province are consolidating their operations in a handful of districts around the provincial capital.

The new US troops in the south are intended to replace departing Dutch soldiers and relieve pressure on underresourced and overburdened military personnel from Britain and Canada, where public support for the war has fallen even more precipitously than in the United States. But the transition entails significant new risks for US forces, who are now responsible for more dangerous parts of the country.

The influx also has elicited conflicting emotions from coalition partners. British and Canadian officers say they didn’t have the manpower or equipment to confront a mushrooming insurgency by themselves, but they also cringe at the need to be bailed out by the United States.

British forces rolled into Musa Qala in early 2006 after the Taliban killed the district chief, but the troops left later that year after striking a deal with the insurgents to not attack the town.

The truce was short-lived, and by the following February, Taliban fighters recaptured the area, prompting the British, aided by the US Army, to conduct a large operation in late 2007 to wrest control of the district center.

The British pushed the Taliban out of the town and the immediate environs. The troops eventually established front lines about 4 miles north and south of the town center that they patrolled up to, but generally not across, meaning everything beyond those lines was insurgent country.

President Hamid Karzai, with the agreement of the British, named a former Taliban commander as the new district governor in an attempt to reintegrate insurgents into peaceful society.

Marine officers said the commander, Mullah Salem, was mercurial and corrupt, but British military and civilian officials deemed Musa Qala stable enough. Life began returning to normal within the security bubble.

But when Marines arrived this March to take over the area, they deemed the status quo untenable. Within 48 hours, they punched beyond the northern front line and seized a town that had long been a Taliban stronghold. Marine units now are targeting insurgents well beyond the old southern line.

“They didn’t pursue the Taliban,’’ the Marine commander here, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Manning, said of the British. “We’ll go after them.’’

But British diplomats and stabilization advisers, who still have lead responsibility for the province under a deal worked out between Washington and London, contend that the Marine expansionism has resulted in more insurgent activity.