A tough-talking, muscular Los Angeles police sergeant steadily rattled off tips to a young Marine riding shotgun as they raced in a patrol car to a drug bust: Be aware of your surroundings. Watch people’s body language. Build rapport.

Marine Lt. Andrew Abbott, 23, took it all in as he peered out at the graffiti-covered buildings, knowing that the lessons he learned recently in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods could help him soon in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“People are the center of gravity and if you do everything you can to protect them, then they’ll protect you,” he said. “That’s something true here and pretty much everywhere.”

Abbott was among 70 Camp Pendleton Marines in a training exercise that aims to adapt the investigative techniques the LAPD has used for decades against violent street gangs to take on the Taliban more as a powerful drug-trafficking mob than an insurgency.

The Marines hope that learning to work like a cop on a beat will help them better track the Taliban, build relationships with Afghans leery of foreign troops and make them better teachers as they try to professionalize an Afghan police force beset by corruption.

The troops believe they can learn valuable lessons from the LAPD, which has made inroads into communities after highly publicized abuses, from the videotaped beating of Rodney King to corruption in an anti-gang unit.

“Their role is to win the hearts and minds of the community and that’s what they did,” said Marine Staff Sgt. Brendan Flynn, who also works as a Los Angeles police officer and will be deployed to help train Afghan police.

The weeklong exercise — unbeknownst to the public — involved Marines dressed in jeans and T-shirts observing drugs busts, witnessing prostitution arrests and even following a murder case. It was the largest group of Marines to embed with the city’s officers.

Abbott, of Long Island, N.Y., rode with Sgt. Arno Clair, a 16-year veteran with salt-and-pepper hair who swims up to a mile a day.

During their afternoon together, police handcuffed a bus driver — moments after he was caught by an undercover officer with $25,000 worth of crack cocaine outside an apartment complex in a south-central Los Angeles neighborhood long plagued by violent gangs.

The tattooed suspect wearing an earring and baggy shorts seemed a world away from the ragtag, Kalashnikov-toting Taliban fighters, just as the streets of south-central Los Angeles are from the dusty villages of mud-brick houses in Afghanistan.

But in many ways, police in Los Angeles’ crime-ridden neighborhoods use the same skills that Marines say could help them.

Marines are in charge of training Afghanistan’s army and police but often have no police experience themselves. Their success in building effective police forces is considered key to stabilizing the country and allowing foreign troops to withdraw.

Marines also are changing their approach, realizing that marching into towns to show force alienates communities. Instead, they are being taught to fan out with interpreters to strike up conversations with truck drivers, money exchangers, cell phone sellers and others.

The rapport building can net valuable information that could even alert troops about potential attacks.

Marines can gather intelligence by picking up the notebooks, receipts and other papers left behind in raids that could provide insight into the opium business the Taliban uses to buy their weapons, Afghan expert Gretchen Peters said.

She told Marines before the Los Angeles patrols that they should follow the lead of some Afghans who have gone from using the term “mujahadeen” or “holy warrior” to identify the Taliban to calling them gangsters.

That, she said, shows how fed up the villagers are with being extorted by them and calling them gangsters will win them over.

“Think of the Taliban as the Sopranos in turbans,” she said. “I think essentially they’re criminals.”

Peters, who has written extensively about the Taliban being a criminal network, has been talking to troops across the country before they deploy to Helmand Province, a top opium-producing region.

Afghanistan supplies 90 percent of the world’s opium, the main ingredient of heroin, and is also the leading global supplier of hashish. Last year, opium seizures soared 924 percent because of better cooperation between Afghan and international forces.

In the end, the police training mission is what will win the war, said Marine 2nd Lt. Jared Siebenaler, 24, of Hastings, Minn., who spent the past six months training police in Afghanistan. But he acknowledged their police mission faces enormous challenges.

Siebenaler said many recruits tested positive for drugs, arriving to work high on hashish if they came at all. Supervisors were believed to be skimming money off their officers’ measly salaries. One force had men from two tribes who could barely stand each other.

And then there’s the language barrier between Marines and the Afghan police.

But like most police work, getting past issues of trust and cultural difference begins with a brief encounter on a street.

As Clair and Abbott cruised past a row of dilapidated homes, the police sergeant told him to notice how a person’s walk and dress changes from street to street, and whether children are playing or hurrying by.

Crime here increases with summer’s heat, he said, encouraging Abbott to identify the violence-trigger in Afghanistan, such as at the end of the poppy harvest.

“What’s happenin,’ man?” Clair said, waving his hand out his window to a man who looked away in disgust.

“If they are on the fence about police and they say ‘hi’ back, then at least we’ve dealt with that issue, and if they don’t, then at least I know who I’m dealing with around here,” he told Abbott.

Abbott, following Clair’s example, waved to a woman in the street. She waved back.

Via: NBC

GARMSER, Afghanistan — The Marines of Bravo Company’s 1st Platoon sleep beside a grove of poppies. Troops in the 2nd Platoon playfully swat at the heavy opium bulbs while walking through the fields. Afghan laborers scraping the plant’s gooey resin smile and wave.

Last week, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit moved into southern Helmand province, the world’s largest opium poppy-growing region, and now find themselves surrounded by green fields of the illegal plants that produce the main ingredient of heroin.

The Taliban, whose fighters are exchanging daily fire with the Marines in Garmser, derives up to $100 million a year from the poppy harvest by taxing farmers and charging safe passage fees — money that will buy weapons for use against U.S., NATO and Afghan troops.

Yet the Marines are not destroying the plants. In fact, they are reassuring villagers the poppies won’t be touched. American commanders say the Marines would only alienate people and drive them to take up arms if they eliminated the impoverished Afghans’ only source of income.

Many Marines in the field are scratching their heads over the situation.

”It’s kind of weird. We’re coming over here to fight the Taliban. We see this. We know it’s bad. But at the same time we know it’s the only way locals can make money,” said 1st Lt. Adam Lynch, 27, of Barnstable, Mass.

The Marines’ battalion commander, Lt. Col. Anthony Henderson, said in an interview Tuesday that the poppy crop ”will come and go” and that his troops can’t focus on it when Taliban fighters around Garmser are ”terrorizing the people.”

”I think by focusing on the Taliban, the poppies will go away,” said Henderson, a 41-year-old from Washington, D.C. He said once the militant fighters are forced out, the Afghan government can move in and offer alternatives.

An expert on Afghanistan’s drug trade, Barnett Rubin, complained that the Marines are being put in such a situation by a ”one-dimensional” military policy that fails to integrate political and economic considerations into long-range planning.

”All we hear is, not enough troops, send more troops,” said Rubin, a professor at New York University. ”Then you send in troops with no capacity for assistance, no capacity for development, no capacity for aid, no capacity for governance.”

Most of the 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan operate in the east, where the poppy problem is not as great. But the 2,400-strong 24th Marines, have taken the field in this southern growing region during harvest season.

In the poppy fields 100 feet from the 2nd Platoon’s headquarters, three Afghan brothers scraped opium resin over the weekend. The youngest, 23-year-old Sardar, said his family would earn little money from the harvest.

”We receive money from the shopkeepers, then they will sell it,” said Sardar, who was afraid to give his last name. ”We don’t have enough money to buy flour for our families. The smugglers make the money,” added Sardar, who worked alongside his 11-year-old son just 20 yards from a Marine guard post, its guns pointed across the field.

Afghanistan supplies some 93 percent of the world’s opium used to make heroin, and the Taliban militants earn up to $100 million from the drug trade, the United Nations estimates. The export value of this harvest was $4 billion — more than a third of the country’s combined gross domestic product.

Though they aren’t eradicating poppies, the Marines presence could still have a positive effect. Henderson said the drug supply lines have been disrupted at a crucial point in the harvest. And Marine commanders are debating staying in Garmser longer than originally planned.

Second Lt. Mark Greenlief, 24, a Monmouth, Ill., native who commands the 2nd Platoon, said he originally wanted to make a helicopter landing zone in Sardar’s field. ”But as you can see that would ruin their poppy field, and we didn’t want to ruin their livelihood.”

Sardar ”basically said, ‘This is my livelihood, I have to do what I can to protect that,”’ said Greenlief. ”I told him we’re not here to eradicate.”

The Taliban told Garmser residents that the Marines were moving in to eradicate, hoping to encourage the villagers to rise up against the Americans, said 2nd Lt. Brandon Barrett, 25, of Marion, Ind., commander of the 1st Platoon.

In the next field over from Sardar’s, Khan Mohammad, an Afghan born in Helmand province who lives in Pakistan and came to work the fields, said he makes only $2 a day. He said the work is dangerous now that Taliban militants are shooting at the U.S. positions.

”We’re stuck in the middle,” he said. ”If we go over there those guys will fire at us. If we come here, we’re in danger, too, but we have to work,” said the 54-year-old Mohammad, who supports a family of 10.

An even older laborer, his back bent by years of work, came over and told the small gathering of Afghans, Marines and journalists that the laborers had to get back to work ”or the boss will get mad at us.”

Staff Sgt. Jeremy Stover, whose platoon is sleeping beside a poppy crop planted in the interior courtyard of a mud-walled compound, said the Marines’ mission is to get rid of the ”bad guys,” and ”the locals aren’t the bad guys.”

”Poppy fields in Afghanistan are the cornfields of Ohio,” said Stover, 28, of Marion, Ohio. ”When we got here they were asking us if it’s OK to harvest poppy and we said, ‘Yeah, just don’t use an AK-47.”’

The U.S. military is looking for light, high-speed four-wheelers that can zip troops around battlezones. And just about every major player in the defense industry — including Blackwater — is lining up to supply the vehicles. Military vehicles have generally gotten heavier in recent years, to protect troops from roadside bombs and other threats. “The latest Humvee model, the M1151, weighs in at more than 5 tons, twice the weight of the original, unarmored M998,” GovExec.com notes. “The military’s new ‘Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected’ vehicle program is awarding contracts to build wheeled transports as heavy as 40 tons.”Dean Lockwood, a Forecast International analyst, tells Defense News, “With the way they have up-armored the Humvees, they are too heavy to do many of the missions they were originally intended to do.” Moreover, he said, up-armored Humvees strain Army helicopters.

So “the U.S. Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command may order thousands of rugged, high-tech, high-speed vehicles that can climb mountains, rescue fallen comrades and lead quick-strike as­sault teams in combat,” Defense News‘ Kris Osborn reports. “Service officials are eyeing pro­totypes and early versions of sev­eral existing vehicles, including ones that can hit 100 mph on roads. [Army] engineers are also exploring individual technologies that may give vehicles the suspen­sion to handle rigorous terrain at high speed.” (The picture, above, is of a Chenoweth strike vehicle, used by U.S. troops in the first Gulf War)

BAGHDAD – Fighting in Baghdad’s Shi’ite slum of Sadr City made April the deadliest month for Iraqi civilians since last August and for U.S. troops since last September, figures obtained on Wednesday showed.

Iraqi Health Ministry figures showed 968 civilian deaths in April, the most in eight months. On Wednesday the U.S. military reported the deaths of five more of its soldiers in Baghdad, raising its monthly toll to 49.

Most of the U.S. and Iraqi deaths were in the capital, where U.S. and government forces have been fighting Shi’ite militants loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the tightly-packed Sadr City slum and other Shi’ite areas.

U.S. forces said they killed another 16 fighters in gunfights, tank battles and strikes from drone aircraft, following heavy fighting on Tuesday in which they killed 34.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who launched a crackdown against Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia a month ago in the southern city of Basra, said on Wednesday the government would disarm the fighters by force if they refuse to lay down their weapons.

Two hospitals in Sadr City said they alone had received the bodies of 421 Iraqis killed and treated more than 2,400 wounded since late March. Many of the dead and wounded have been civilians, caught in the crossfire in the crowded slum.

Some of the heaviest fighting has taken place in the past three days, with militiamen taking advantage of blinding dust storms that ground U.S. attack helicopters to launch large-scale ambushes of U.S. and Iraqi positions.

U.S. forces have responded with tank fire and surface-to-surface missiles, destroying buildings.

Thirty-four bodies and 112 wounded victims were brought to the two Sadr City hospitals in the last 24 hours, hospital officials said.

U.S. forces reported three soldiers killed in Baghdad overnight and another two killed on Wednesday afternoon.

April’s U.S. death toll is the highest since September 2007, when 65 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq, according to official figures tracked by icasualties.org, an independent website.

The tolls for both soldiers and civilians are still far lower than a year ago, however. In April 2007, 104 U.S. service members and 1,506 Iraqi civilians were killed.

U.S. commanders say the sectarian violence between Sunni Arabs and Shi’ites that characterized earlier years remains sharply lower. But the uprising by Shi’ite militia over the past month has reversed a long trend of declining violence.

MALIKI SETS CONDITIONS

Maliki aimed some of his toughest language yet at the Shi’ite fighters on Wednesday, singling out the Mehdi Army by name and grouping it with Sunni Arab groups like al Qaeda as organizations that must be dissolved.

He set down four conditions — that militias disarm, stop interfering in state affairs, stop running their own courts and hand over wanted fugitives — or face a military assault.

“To refuse these conditions means the continuation of the government’s efforts to disarm them by force,” Maliki said at a news conference inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone government and diplomatic compound.

“There is no alternative to these conditions. The alternative is the continuation of force and clashes until we reach the end, to get rid of the weapons and the gangs who are carrying weapons.”

Maliki, himself a Shi’ite, launched a crackdown against Mehdi Army fighters last month in the southern city of Basra.

After initial setbacks, the Basra offensive appears to have been a success in driving fighters from the streets there. But the militiamen remain in control of much of Baghdad’s Sadr City.

U.S. Marines caught using illegal drugs often face harsh punishment from the military, according to counselors, veterans’ advocates and military defense attorneys. Marines have been kicked out of the service with loss of benefits, or even thrown in jail despite their claim that they turned to drugs to cope with their battlefield experiences in Iraq.While the Marine Corps does provide substance abuse and counseling, experts say rehabilitation often loses out to punishment and discipline.
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