Marines drafting plan to send more troops to Afghanistan
Top officers have met repeatedly to consider deploying 15,000 troops to join the 30,000 already there to fight the Taliban and other insurgents.
Reporting from Marine Headquarters At Al Asad, Iraq -- Marine Corps leaders are devising a plan to send thousands of additional combat troops to Afghanistan to wage aggressive warfare against the Taliban that they expect could take years.
The Marines would like to deploy more than 15,000 troops if Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, newly named head of the U.S. Central Command, approve. About 2,300 Marines have already been sent to Afghanistan to replace units from Twentynine Palms, Calif., and Camp Lejeune, N.C., that are returning home after eight months.
Gates said Friday that he wanted to supplement the more than 30,000 American troops, mostly from the Army, already in Afghanistan. An additional 30,000 troops from other North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and allies are also stationed in Afghanistan to combat the Taliban and other Islamist insurgent forces.
The office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Sunday that President-elect Barack Obama called Karzai during the weekend to say his administration would dedicate additional aid to fight militant groups in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported.
The Marine proposal was shaped during a series of meetings in Afghanistan, Iraq and Bahrain in the last week involving generals and other top officers. Marine Commandant Gen. James T. Conway was in contact with a group headed by Lt. Gen. Samuel Helland, commanding general of the Marine Force Central Command, traveling from base to base.
"Treat every day as a combat mission," Helland wrote in a battle plan for one of his commanders. "Have a plan to kill the enemy hiding among the innocent."
The Marines have long made no secret of their desire to depart from Iraq and redeploy to Afghanistan, where they were the first conventional U.S. troops in 2001 to invade the country to assist local forces in toppling the Taliban regime.
Finding troops will not be easy unless there is a significant drawdown in Iraq, where Marines have been deployed to Anbar province, west of Baghdad, since 2004. The Marines have about 22,000 troops in the sprawling province, assigned mostly to back up Iraqi security forces if the Sunni Arab insurgency attempts to rebound.
Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the top Marine in Iraq, who met with Helland last week, said there could be a "significant" reduction in Anbar within months without endangering progress made toward routing the insurgency and strengthening the Iraqi economy, political structure and security forces.
