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BAGHDAD, Iraq (May 19, 2008) - The 1st Marine Division's 2nd
Battalion, 7th Marines' is focusing on Afghan people, not on
fighting terrorists, the battalion commander said May 16.
What's unique about our mission is that we're doing a police
training and mentoring mission, as opposed to coming in here
kinetically like a lot of our past exploits have been, especially
in Iraq," Marine Corps Lt. Col. Richard Hall told online
journalists and "bloggers" in a teleconference.
The 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, deployed at the end of March for
this mission to assist Afghanistan's Regional Security Command
South with their focused district development program for Afghan
police. The program rotates local police forces through eight weeks
of uniformed-officer training at a central location, while highly
trained Afghan national civil police work in their districts.
Hall explained that the battalion also will facilitate
"in-district reform" police training for districts the Afghan
national civil police are unable to backfill due to personnel
shortages. "That is kind of the way that we can fast-track getting
more of these districts [to] get their police trained," he
said.
The 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, had success in Iraq executing
the police mission in Anbar province, Hall said, and he added that
before this deployment, the battalion completed a month-long
training exercise called "Mojave Viper," designed specifically to
prepare them for the police situation in Afghanistan.
"We spent quite a bit of time focusing on escalation-of-force
vignettes," he said. That training, he explained, focuses on the
civil portion of police work.
Though the battalion will do the quantifiable work of improving
the Afghans' policing skills, Hall said, the enduring piece of the
training will need to be the mentoring and character development --
"in other words, doing the right thing when no one is looking," he
said.
"The reason for that is, whether or not we get replaced, ... we
need to teach a man to fish so that they could be self-sufficient
with or without our presence," he explained. "They need to have the
credibility and the respectability of their people in order to
maintain that law and order presence, even if we're absent."
Hall said he believes that since the Marines and the Afghans are
both "of a warrior culture," the battalion will be able to earn the
credibility needed to influence and affect the character of the
district police officers.
"I think [the Afghans are] ... going to catch the sense that
we're really sincere about our mission and what we're trying to do,
and they're going to make no distinction between us and them," Hall
said. "I think that's really going to add to the character piece,
because they absolutely do respect that of other men -- you know,
sharing the danger and so forth."
But although that factor works in his favor, he acknowledged, it
won't be easy.
"We don't pretend that it's not going to be a huge challenge,"
he said. "The truth will be in action, when we actually get out
there, and we give it a try. We can only hope that everything I've
said comes true."
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