PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The biggest U.S. military surge since Iraq and Afghanistan is scaling back a month after the troops arrived in haste to aid victims of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake.
Great gray ships have been leaving behind Haiti’s battered shores as thousands of American troops pack up their tents. The mission, however, is far from over.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the U.S. will be in Haiti for the long haul, although troop strength is down to 13,000 from a Feb. 1 peak of 20,000. Those who remain will accompany Haitians in an arduous struggle toward recovery.
Also Sunday, Haiti’s government said it would ban a commonly used quarry sand from structural construction in an attempt to improve building safety. Poor construction, including flimsy bricks made from the quarry sand, is blamed for the collapse of many buildings in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Within a broad international relief effort, U.S. forces have provided some of the most visible support to a nation whose government and infrastructure were nearly wiped out.
They have shored up the capital’s quake-damaged port to operate at several times its pre-quake tonnage, while acting as a security and logistics mainstay for U.N. food distributions. Military choppers have delivered life-sustaining relief to isolated villages.
The flow of injured quake victims to the USNS Comfort hospital ship has eased, but the need for medical facilities remains overwhelming in Port- au-Prince.
U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. Douglas Fraser would not specify during a weekend visit what U.S. troop levels would be in the coming months.
“Remember that the capability and the capacity the United States military brought in was for immediate relief,” he told reporters.
The U.S. military already is turning certain tasks back over to the Haitians, such as daytime air-traffic control at Port- au-Prince’s damaged international airport, where commercial flights are expected to resume by Friday.
Half of the 13,000 current U.S. troops in Haiti are on the ground, with the others offshore on hospital boats or handling deliveries and logistics.
Many Haitians said they are most grateful for the U.S. troops providing security during food distributions, a life- and-death matter for most of the 1.2 million made homeless by the quake.
Far smaller contingents of Canadian, French, Italian, South Korean and Japanese troops are also in Haiti, and European Union engineering units are expected in coming weeks to help build temporary shelters.
