On Sunday they turned over to Afghan authorities the keys to Camp Leatherneck, the sprawling base in Helmand from which the Marines surged against the Taliban in 2009.
Helmand
was the epicenter of President Barack Obama's surge against the
Taliban. The Marines focused on it so completely that some dubbed it
"Marine-istan."
It was the
fight the Marines itched for after they switched their attention from
Iraq's Anbar province, which by 2008 had grown so quiet that Marines
complained of boredom.
"There
aren't a whole heck of a lot of bad guys there left to fight," the
Marine Corps commandant at the time, Gen. James T. Conway, said in
August 2008 with an eye on getting a piece of the Afghan action.
After
the Marines had turned the tide in Helmand, the man who succeeded
Conway, Gen. James Amos, said in 2011 that it was time to begin handing
over control to the Afghans, whose ability to handle the Taliban and
unify their fractured country would ultimately decide the outcome of the
U.S. chapter of this war."We can't stay in Afghanistan forever," Amos said.
While
there, the Marines took on the Taliban, mentored Afghan soldiers and
executed a protect-the-population counterinsurgency strategy. They also
suffered at the hands of Afghan allies who periodically turned their
weapons on them in "green-on-blue" killings that peaked in 2012 but have
since subsided.
The Marines point with pride to their successes in Helmand,
where Afghan security forces now are in charge. But some question
whether those gains will be sustained after the Marines are gone and the
Taliban seek another comeback.
Just two years ago at the British-run Camp Bastion, adjacent to Leatherneck, the Taliban pulled off arguably their most stunning attack on a NATO base of the entire war: Fifteen insurgents breached the camp's security perimeter and, using grenades, machine guns and other light weapons, killed two Marines and destroyed or heavily damaged nine aircraft.
In all, about 76,000 Marines served in Afghanistan since 2001, mostly in Helmand, according to Marine Corps records.
The
Marines are now departing as the U.S. prepares to complete its combat
mission in December and transition to a NATO-organized follow-on
mission, called Resolute Support, to train and advise Afghan forces.
There are still a little over 21,000 American troops in Afghanistan,
down from a 2010-11 peak of 100,000.
The
saga of Marines in southwestern Afghanistan began with the
controversial decision to make Helmand the main focus of Obama's initial
surge of American troops in early 2009. Some believed it should instead
be the neighboring province of Kandahar, whose far bigger population
seemed to make it of greater strategic importance.
In
his book, "Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan,"
author Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote that the consequences were profound.
"By devoting so many troops to Helmand instead of Kandahar, the U.S. military squandered more than a year of the war," he wrote.
"Had
the initial contingent of Marines been sent to Kandahar, it could have
obviated the need for a full 30,000-troop surge later that year, or it
could have granted commanders the flexibility to combat insurgent havens
in eastern Afghanistan much sooner, allowing them to meet Obama's
eventual withdrawal deadlines without objection."
When
the Marines took on Helmand they did so with gusto. The scene of some
of the hardest fighting was Sangin, a district along the Helmand River
that for years was a Taliban stronghold. Dozens of Marines were killed
in battles in 2010 that eventually turned the tide against an adaptive
insurgency. In one four-day stretch in October 2010, nine members of 3rd
Battalion, 5th Marines, out of Camp Pendleton, California, were killed.
The
toll that autumn became so great that then-Defense Secretary Robert
Gates recommended pulling the battalion out of Sangin temporarily,
though the Marines declined, saying it could break the spirit of that
battalion.
In March 2011 Gates visited the battalion at its base near Sangin and applauded the Marines for their "strategic breakthrough."
"Before
you arrived here, the Taliban were dug in deep, and as the British
before you can attest, this district was one of the most dangerous — not
just in Afghanistan, but maybe in the whole world." Gates said.
Helmand
was not the Marine Corps' first plunge into Afghanistan. In November
2001, Marine Brig. Gen. James Mattis led a contingent of Marines and
soldiers, dubbed Task Force 58, into southern Afghanistan in an air
assault that established the first conventional U.S. military presence
in the country.
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