US troops have installed a new provincial governor in the Afghan town of Marjah nearly two weeks since launching the largest assault of the eight-year occupation of Afghanistan. Over 11,000 US and Afghan troops have battled a few hundred Taliban fighters. The Washington Post reported this week Marjah was attacked not for its military significance, but to “convince Americans that a new era has arrived in the eight-year-long war and to show Afghans that U.S. [and Afghan] forces…can protect them from the Taliban.”