A Hairy Fight

When Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway visited the dusty hinterlands of southern Afghanistan last week, probably the last thing he expected to find was U.S. Marines with full, bushy beards. But there they were, members of the Marines' Special Operations Command unit, known as MarSOC.

While a complete departure from the Corps' fastidious clean-shaven image, the beards have been adopted by small, largely independent teams training Afghan forces and conducting high-level missions in remote areas. Commanders say the facial hair is a signal to the Muslim population that the Americans respect their customs.

But beyond the uncustomary grooming procedures, the Marine Corps' top commander didn't seem surprised by much during his trip into Afghanistan, a country where a resurgent Taliban has been wreaking havoc and insurgent groups have been bleeding over the porous borders with Pakistan. There are currently about 3,400 Marines deployed in Afghanistan, and Conway said far more are needed to do the job.

But the Marines' hands are tied in sending more troops unless there is a reduction of the 24,000 Marines currently deployed in Iraq. The service is not big enough to handle a protracted war on two fronts, Conway has said. The time is ripe for a drawdown in Iraq's Al Anbar Province, he has long argued, pointing to security improvements logged with each passing week. For the better part of the past year, Conway has attempted to sway Pentagon war planners to shift the focus for Marines from Iraq to the mountains of Afghanistan, where they are better suited to fight as an expeditionary force.

"There's not much enemy left in Iraq but there's plenty of enemy here to be dealt with," Conway told more than 100 Marines deployed at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base during his recent visit. The trip is one of several the plain-spoken commander takes every year in order to brief Marines down to the lowest enlisted ranks on the service's big-picture issues.

Conditions are undeniably better in Iraq each week, the general told a NEWSWEEK reporter traveling with him. "On average, you've got three attacks a day in Anbar Province. It used to be several hundred a day."

This past spring, Marines were given a toehold into the resurging Afghan fight when an infantry battalion and a Marine Expeditionary Unit were sent as part of a one-time surge into southern Afghanistan. The Marines were assigned territory that had previously undergone only intermittent patrols, Conway said. As a result, casualty numbers in Afghanistan are now surpassing those in Iraq. There were 65 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan in May, June and July--the highest three-month tally since the war began in 2001, according to the Associated Press. And the military death toll in July eclipsed that of Iraq for the first time since that war began in 2003, the AP reported.