Under cover of night, driving through the desert or landing from helicopters, America’s marines went “big, strong, fast” into the Taliban’s strongholds in Helmand province. More than 4,000 marines and about 650 Afghan soldiers reached their targets in just seven hours.

Operation Khanjar (Thrust of the Sword), which began on July 2nd, was the biggest action by the marines since they retook the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004. But unlike their comrades in that bloody urban battle, the marines now in Afghanistan have, for the most part, thrust their swords into hot air. With the Taliban melting away in many places, the marines’ biggest enemy has often been the heat—”hot as fire”, says their commander, Brigadier-General Larry Nicholson. Some complained they had not been able to fire enough rounds to lighten their heavy packs.

But General Nicholson, for one, was not disappointed. His object was not to kill Taliban soldiers but to protect the population. Each company commander was told his first task should be to organise a council, or shura, with local elders to deliver the message that the marines had come to stay and to extend the writ of the central government in Kabul. A parallel operation, Panchai Palang (Panther’s Claw), has been a gritty and bloody affair in which British forces have been slugging it out with the Taliban for control of the district of Nad Ali. The British have lost seven soldiers, including a battalion commander in the Welsh Guards, Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, this month alone.

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