Word: helmand
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...Missions Impossible In Afghanistan, British troops confront unrest, devastation and chaos every day, and the vast majority do so with bravery and honor. Most of Britain's contingent is based in the southern province of Helmand. Deployed among a desperately poor population and struggling to bring stability to an area largely devoid of civil structures and institutions, the troops face an insurgency that is fluid and increasingly deadly...
...vehicles and they said, 'Right, here's your town. There's a police force here that's largely ineffective, there's no law and order in the city. Make it work.'" Now a grizzled veteran of 30, Woodward is back at Sandhurst preparing cadets to encounter similar challenges in Helmand...
...1/12's problems were compounded by a practically nonexistent local government, led by a district governor who insisted on keeping his office at the battalion's forward operating base, rather than among the people. "And then the Afghan army regiment we were supposed to partner with was diverted to Helmand province, for the battle in Marjah," says Brown. And the so-called civilian surge - the civil and economic development component of the offensive, led by the State Department - arrived late and weak. "So the 1/12's been out there, pretty much alone," a State Department official based in Kandahar told...
...residents against the Afghan soldiers who destroyed their opium crops. "Eradicating marijuana and opium fields can breed resentment by people and be destabilizing," says John Dempsey, a rule-of-law adviser to U.S. and Afghan officials for the U.S. Institute of Peace. He cites the town of Marjah, in Helmand province, where U.S. forces rolled tanks over poppy fields in a major offensive in February, two years after Afghan forces destroyed the local farmers' opium crops. After those antidrug offensives, Dempsey says, "local residents felt they preferred the Taliban, because they let them grow opium." About 70% of the farmers...
...flew into Marjah over a patchwork of poppy fields - not exactly a sea of poppies, but plenty of them. It was two weeks before the harvest, and the last blossoms were floating away in the dusty haze of Helmand province, leaving the prohibitively weird-looking, blue-gray bulbs bald and ready for processing, like an army of alien vegetative creatures. We landed in a wheat field just across the road from the district governor's pathetic headquarters. It was Day 45 after the operation to retrieve Marjah from the Taliban had begun, and the highest-ranking U.S. military official, Admiral...