PDA

View Full Version : Camp Pendleton units get Afghanistan assignment



thedrifter
03-10-09, 06:39 AM
MILITARY: Camp Pendleton units get Afghanistan assignment

By MARK WALKER - Staff Writer

CAMP PENDLETON ---- About 1,400 Camp Pendleton Marines and sailors have been ordered to join the fight in Afghanistan this spring, the first large-scale deployment from this base to that country since the 2001 U.S. invasion.

About 1,000 of the troops are from the base's 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment. An additional 400 are from the 1st Combat Engineer Battalion.

They will be joined by 900 more Marines and sailors from the 3rd Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment artillery unit based at the Marine Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert, 1st Marine Division spokesman Cpl. Erik Villagran said Monday.

The 2,300 California leathernecks are part of a 17,000-member force ordered to Afghanistan by President Barack Obama last month to blunt rising Taliban and al-Qaida attacks.

The Marine force will total about 8,000 with units in North Carolina and Hawaii also getting the assignment.

The Marines will be joined by a 4,000-member Army brigade and an additional 5,000 support forces to total the 17,000 troops the president is dispatching.

The deployment comes as the U.S. shifts resources and troops from a relatively stable Iraq to the increasingly volatile Afghanistan, where U.S. deaths from roadside bombings, rockets and rifle attacks have risen sharply in recent months.

Once there, the fresh forces will raise the number of American military personnel to about 38,000, giving commanders a little more than half the additional troops they asked for to meet the surge in violence.

As winter gives way to spring, military officials have said they said expect more Taliban-led attacks.

The local Marines who will soon confront those attacks will work under the banner of the II Marine Expeditionary Brigade headed by Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, a former Camp Pendleton officer. Nicholson was installed as the brigade commander during a Monday morning ceremony at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Nicholson told reporters covering that event that his forces will work with the Afghan national army.

"If I'm a villager in southern Afghanistan and see U.S. Marines come by with no Afghan forces, how does that inspire trust and confidence or faith in the central government," he said.

The 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment is training for Afghanistan at Twentynine Palms, Villagran said. That unit has a simple and stark slogan: "Make Peace or Die."

Negotiations with moderate elements of the Taliban is one option under consideration to reduce the violence, Obama said in an interview with the New York Times published Saturday. He compared the effort to what took place in Iraq with Sunni extremists, an effort largely undertaken by Marine Corps commanders.

"There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region," Obama told the newspaper, adding the task would not be easy.

"The situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex," he said. "You have a less-governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, and so figuring all that out is going to be much more of a challenge."

The Afghanistan assignment for local Marines comes just weeks after thousands of Camp Pendleton and Miramar Marine Corps Air Station troops returned from Iraq. Those troops are not included in the Afghanistan assignment, for which a specific starting date has not been determined.

With the planned drawdown in Iraq, officials have said they do not expect any more large-scale Marine deployments to that country if the relative calm there continues to hold.

For more than a year now, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway has been pressing to move all of his troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, arguing the combat environment there is a better fit for his forces.

The Marines heading to the south-central Asian nation that hosted al-Qaida training camps prior to the late 2001 toppling of the hardline Taliban government are being assigned to southern provinces. That region is where attacks against U.S. and NATO troops have risen dramatically in recent months.

U.S. deaths in Afghanistan more than tripled in January and February compared with the same period in 2008, rising from eight that year to 29 in the first two months of 2009.

Brig. Gen. Nicholson, the man overseeing the Marine force, is a combat veteran who survived wounds in a 2004 rocket attack in Iraq when he was commanding Camp Pendleton's Regimental Combat Team 1. As he was being evacuated, Nicholson vowed to his Marines, "I'll be back."

He did return a few months later and, in 2006, was back in Iraq yet again as commander of the base's 5th Marine Regiment.

From August 2007 until August 2008, Nicholson was deputy commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Center in Quantico, Va.

Contact staff writer Mark Walker at (760) 740-3529 or mlwalker@nctimes.com.

Ellie