Afghanistan: A Tale of Soldiers and a School

The Pir Mohammed School was built by Canadians in 2005, in Senjaray, a town just outside the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. It is said that 3,000 students attended, including some girls — although that seems a bit of a stretch, given the size and rudimentary nature of the campus. There are two buildings, a row and a horseshoe of classrooms, separated by a playground in a walled compound. No doubt, the exaggerations about the school’s size reflect a deeper truth: most everyone in Senjaray loved the idea that their children were learning to read and write — except the local Taliban. They closed the school in 2007, breaking all the windows and furniture, booby-trapping the place, lacing the surrounding area with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), daring the Canadians to reopen it. But the Canadians were overmatched, and it wasn’t until December of 2009, when the Americans came to Senjaray, that people began to talk about reopening the school.

It was, in fact, a no-brainer, a perfect metaphor. The Taliban closed schools; the Americans opened them. That this particular school was located deep in the enemy heartland, in a district — Zhari — that was 80% controlled by the Taliban, an area the Russians called the Heart of Darkness and eventually refused to travel through, in a town that will be strategically crucial when the most important battle of the war in Afghanistan — the battle for Kandahar — is contested this summer, made it all the more perfect.

(See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.)

“From the start, the people here said they wanted better security and the school,” said Captain Jeremiah Ellis, the commander of Dog Company of the 1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, the 120 soldiers who represented the American presence in Senjaray. “We are required to ask certain questions on patrol: What are your problems here? What do you need? It’s called a TCAF interview, for some reason.” Ellis, a young man well acquainted with the uses of, and need for, irony when dealing with the command structure, raised an eyebrow and smiled. Later, I looked it up. A TCAF is a Tactical Conflict Assessment Framework — in English, an interview script. “Anyway, we’ve been asking the TCAF questions for months now. People look at us and think, ‘Why do you keep asking the same questions and not doing anything? You must be one stupid bunch of Caucasians,’ ” Ellis continued, replaying the dialogue. “It’s totally insulting: ‘What do you need here?’ ‘Open the frigging school, just like last week.’ “

No one — no one — wanted to reopen the Pir Mohammed School more than Jeremiah Ellis. He had worked on it for months; he figured it would be Dog Company’s legacy in Senjaray. It fit perfectly into the Army’s new counterinsurgency doctrine: protect the people, provide them with security and government services, and they will turn away from the insurgency. Unlike many of his fellow officers in Zhari district, and many of the troops under his command, Ellis really believed in counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine.

He still does, but he’s more skeptical now. The past four months in Senjaray have taught him how difficult it is to do COIN in an area that is, in effect, controlled by the enemy — and with a command structure that is tangled in bureaucracy and paralyzed by the incompetence and corruption of the local Afghan leadership. Indeed, as the struggle to open the school — or get anything of value at all done in Senjaray — progressed, the metaphor was transformed into a much bigger question: If the U.S. Army couldn’t open a small school in a crucial town, how could it expect to succeed in Afghanistan?

(See pictures of President George W. Bush in the Middle East.)

And yet, as April began, the reopening of the Pir Mohammed School seemed imminent. Ellis had gotten all the elements in place, including a Canadian bomb-removal team. His superiors at battalion headquarters thought that reopening a school in the Taliban’s front yard was such a feel-good story that a reporter should be around to record it. I happened to be in the neighborhood, and Captain Ellis graciously invited me — and photographer Adam Ferguson — along for the ride.

The Terrain
Jeremiah Ellis is not an Army lifer. He has other plans. He has a degree in outdoor education from the University of New Hampshire that he wants to start using as soon as possible. “What I really want to do,” he says, “is use experiential education — rock climbing, hiking and so forth — as a form of therapy for veterans coming home.” Ellis joined the Army so he could get scholarship money for a master’s degree, but he’s been an enthusiastic soldier, a graduate of the Army’s famed, grueling Ranger School. “I joined the Army because it was an outdoor thing. You know, jump out of helicopters, crawl in the mud, sit around the campfire. But being a captain is the limit for that sort of stuff. Anything above this is a desk job.” He is 29 years old, with quiet blue eyes and a garrulous informality that is explosive, intense and distinctly American.

Ellis did one tour in Iraq, and that was enough — for him, but not for the Army, which stop-lossed him (the term of art for officers is involuntary re-enlistment). He seems to have stowed any anger or resentment he may have had; his devotion to the mission in Senjaray seems absolute. “We’re down to the last few months of our deployment — and that’s a dangerous time,” Ellis told me, sitting in his office, a rude plywood cabin at Combat Outpost Senjaray. “The natural tendency is to get careless and defensive. To keep them safe, I need these guys to stay focused and on top of the mission.”

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That task is more difficult because the 1/12 battalion hasn’t exactly had a terrific rotation in Afghanistan. “We’ve been asked to do a lot of different things,” says Major Korey Brown, the battalion’s executive officer. “They detached us from our brigade, which is headquartered in eastern Afghanistan, and sent us out here to Zhari district to be storm troopers — that’s what General Vance called us — and that’s what we were trained for, that’s what we like to do. To find, fix and finish the enemy.” But the mission changed with the arrival of General Stanley McChrystal, as commander of the International Security Assistance Force in the summer of 2009. “It’s not about how you engage the enemy so much now. It’s how you engage your district governor,” says Brown. “That’s a huge change for guys like us — call us knuckle draggers or whatever, but we weren’t trained to do COIN.”

(See pictures of Person of the Year 2009 Runner-Up General Stanley McChrystal.)

The 1/12’s problems were compounded by a practically nonexistent local government, led by a district governor who insisted on keeping his office at the battalion’s forward operating base, rather than among the people. “And then the Afghan army regiment we were supposed to partner with was diverted to Helmand province, for the battle in Marjah,” says Brown. And the so-called civilian surge — the civil and economic development component of the offensive, led by the State Department — arrived late and weak. “So the 1/12’s been out there, pretty much alone,” a State Department official based in Kandahar told me. “No Afghan military partner, a lousy relationship with the local government and not enough help from us.”

And yet, Zhari is strategically crucial, the gateway to Kandahar city from the west, the staging area for most Taliban activity in the region. It is a largely rural district straddling the Afghan Ring Road and the Arghandab River. It includes the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar’s hometown of Sangsar. The Taliban aren’t outside agitators here; they are neighbors — not exactly beloved neighbors, given their propensity for violence and peremptory taxation, but more trustworthy than a deeply corrupt Afghan government and much more familiar than the foreign troops. Senjaray is the largest population center, a town of somewhere from 8,000 to 12,000 (there hasn’t been a census), at the eastern end of the Zhari district. If Senjaray can’t be won over, Kandahar won’t be.

As it became clear that the 1/12 was more comfortable with traditional soldiering than with counterinsurgency, the skepticism about its efficacy grew in the higher ranks of the military command. The 1/12 was hunkered down at its headquarters, a remote outpost called Forward Operating Base James Wilson, and the brass wanted it out securing the populace. Since the populace was concentrated in Senjaray, that seemed a logical place to start — and Jeremiah Ellis seemed the perfect candidate to lead the way. “He’s one of the smartest officers we have,” one of Ellis’ superiors told me. “But he can take that enthusiasm a fair distance past the limits of standard Army procedures.”

(See pictures of a U.S. Marines’ offensive in Afghanistan.)

Actually, the captain’s enthusiasm was fed by a series of briefings from various humanitarian and economic-development agencies. “They made it seem like Senjaray was the most important place in the world,” Ellis says now. “They promised us everything. We were going to get in there and really deliver the goods.”

The Canal
And so, Ellis went into Senjaray in December of 2009 with a real head of steam. He gathered the town elders for a series of shuras and told them about all the goodies that could be headed their way if they agreed to stand with him against the Taliban. By mid-January, he had a written document in English and Pashtu, signed by 12 local elders, promising cooperation and listing the various programs they would soon see. There was the school, of course, and a new medical clinic, and a renovation of the bazaar; there were new police stations, solar-powered wells, paved highways, bridges and irrigation canals.

Actually, the elders — as opposed to the people of Senjaray — seemed more interested in the irrigation canals than anything else. In fact, the two most important leaders — the rather flaccid local warlord who was named Hajji Lala, and the police chief, whose 40 cops were dedicated to the protection of Hajji Lala — were interested in one specific canal. Unfortunately, it was not the canal Ellis wanted to refurbish on the poorer, north side of town. It was on the south side. “O.K., let’s walk down there and check it out,” Ellis said.

“We can’t walk,” the local police chief told him. “We have to drive.” And so they drove — 20 km west of Senjaray and then south. They were nowhere near town. “You might well ask, Why there?” Ellis says. Well, as it happened both Hajji Lala and the police chief owned farmland just south of the proposed canal. “But who was I to stand in the way of progress?” Ellis adds, dryly. “I could put hundreds of people to work, pay them 600 Afghans [$3] a day.” It was the beginning of a partnership. Ellis wanted to prove he could produce. The project would begin the following week.

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See pictures of Afghanistan’s dangerous Korengal Valley.

But nobody showed up for work the following week. Ellis asked the elders what had happened. There was a problem, he was told. “We need to pay the workers ourselves,” he was told. “We can’t be seen having you pay the workers. The Taliban will cut our heads off.” That seemed decidedly implausible. The Taliban were going to know where the money was coming from, no matter who put it in the workers’ hands. “I know you are all honorable men,” Ellis told the elders in a scene later reported by the Wall Street Journal. “But not everybody else is. The Canadians are not always honorable, and neither are we Americans.” He proposed they set up a clandestine video camera to record the daily payments, but the elders didn’t want that either.

“It turned out, the situation was more complicated than I figured,” Ellis says now. In fact, it wasn’t a case of local corruption at all. Within days, intelligence collected from multiple sources revealed that several of the town elders had driven across the border to Quetta, in Pakistan, to clear the canal project with the Taliban leadership. “Apparently, they made a very convincing pitch,” Ellis says, and his superiors later confirmed to me. “The canal project would enrich the area. It would be there when the Americans were gone. And the Taliban agreed: the project could go ahead, but they wanted 50% of the workers’ pay.”

(See pictures of President Barack Obama in Afghanistan.)

It was now apparent that almost any development project the Americans tried in Senjaray would end up benefitting the Taliban — except one: reopening the Pir Mohammed School.

The Rules of Engagement
Senjaray is a warren of mud walls and unpaved streets, dust and more dust, shaped like a hornet’s nest hanging from the branch of a tree. The branch is the Afghan Ring Road, a two-lane paved highway. The U.S. fort is located just north of the highway; the Taliban control the land to the south, a lush farming area, irrigated by water from the Arghandab River. The dividing line is a canal that runs along the southern border of the town; the Pir Mohammed School sits on the banks of both that canal and one other, which runs along the eastern edge of the hornet’s nest. “It’s a crucial strategic position,” Ellis says. “My plan was to build a strongpoint next to the school that would later be converted into an Afghan police station. It was necessary to protect the teachers and students, but it was also necessary to protect the town. That intersection was the Taliban’s way in, and as soon as the enemy found out that we wanted to reopen the school, they began to concentrate their forces on the area as well.” Indeed, sources up the chain of command told me that the Taliban were moving forces into the Arghandab Valley, in anticipation of the summer fighting season.

And yet, the war in Senjaray had an odd, lugubrious battle rhythm. There were few direct confrontations between the Americans and the Taliban; the usual sounds of war, the crackle of small-arms fire and thump of mortars were rarely heard. Just an occasional boom — as an IED went off. Sometimes the Taliban blew themselves up, attempting to set the bombs; occasionally, Americans were the victims. On Feb. 21, one American was killed and another severely wounded in an IED explosion just south of town. “I decided to stop the patrols down there after that,” Ellis says. “Given the rules of engagement, it was just too dangerous to keep going there and getting blown up.”

In another war — Vietnam, for certain — an American officer might have cleared the Taliban-controlled area with air strikes. But that sort of indiscriminate bombing doesn’t happen in Afghanistan; General McChrystal has issued a series of tactical directives and rules of engagement banning most forms of air support. There are also new rules governing when and how troops on the ground can use their weapons. “Look at these,” Ellis told me, tossing a fat sheaf of directives onto his desk. “Some of these are written by freaking lawyers, and I’m supposed to read them aloud to my troops. It’s laughable. We can’t fire warning shots. We can’t even fire pen flares to stop an oncoming vehicle. If a guy shoots at you, then puts down his weapon and runs away, you can’t fire back at him because you might harm a civilian.”

(See Joe Klein discuss why Stanley McChrystal was a 2009 Person of the Year runner-up.)

The troops hate the new rules. Indeed, a soldier from another of the 1/12’s companies sent an angry e-mail to McChrystal, saying the new rules were endangering the troops. The General immediately flew down to Zhari and walked a patrol with that soldier’s platoon. “It was a good experience,” McChrystal told me later. “I explained to them why we needed the rules. And I’ve been making it my practice to go out on patrol with other units ever since.”

Ellis understands the rationale for the rules — “It’s what distinguishes us from the Taliban” — but that doesn’t make them easier to enforce. Just after the fatal IED attack in February, a man on a motorcycle emerged from a crowd in south Senjaray and seemed to charge a U.S. patrol. “They shouted at him, tried to get him to stop, but he kept coming — faster, it seemed. Finally, they fired a warning shot into the ground, but it bounced up and hit the guy in the hip. What the soldiers couldn’t see was that he had two kids on the cycle with him. The bullet passed through his leg and struck both the kids in their legs.”

None of the wounds were life-threatening. The victims were in a medevac helicopter, on their way to a field hospital within a half hour. “And in a weird way, it turned into a plus for us,” Ellis says. “After they were released, we continued to treat them with antibiotics, painkillers and new bandages. When people saw how well we were treating them, they were grateful. The motorcycle driver’s brother started helping us with some good information. But we had to go through an intense legal inquiry about the shooting.”

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There is a caveat to McChrystal’s rules of engagement. A soldier is always permitted to use his or her discretion in a matter of self-defense. But the overall impact of the rules has been a hunkering down, a decidedly less aggressive attitude about going after the enemy, from the air or from the ground. “Day by day, we’re watching the Taliban put in IEDs, creeping up toward the town,” Ellis says. “I’m losing two inches of Senjaray every day.” The effect on morale has been brutal. “Maybe half the guys in Dog Company spent their last tour in Iraq, in Ramadi, in 2007,” says First Sergeant Jack Robison. “That was a great tour. When we arrived, the place was a disaster. We cleaned it up. After a year, we could leave with a real sense of accomplishment.” But this tour was different. They had two months left, and the tide seemed to be running against them. Robison thought that opening the Pir Mohammed School might mitigate the sense of failure, but he also had to admit that a fair number of his men didn’t want to take any more risks. They just wanted to go home.

(See pictures of U.S. troops in Iraq.)

The School
Ellis began his efforts to open Pir Mohammed in late January. To get permission to reopen the school, he needed the approval of three separate command structures — his battalion superiors, the Canadians who ran Task Force Kandahar and their NATO superiors at Regional Command-South, the NATO regional command for southern Afghanistan. He also needed the approval of the local, district and regional Afghan government authorities. That part wasn’t too bad. Ellis was a gung-ho briefer. On Saturday, April 3, I watched him describe the school operation to a group of Canadian generals. “That was one of the most impressive op rants I’ve seen in a long time,” Lieut. General Andrew Leslie, the Canadian chief of land staff, said when Ellis finished — and later, he confided to me, “This is the kind of officer you really want out here.”

But the logistics were a killer. To reopen the school, Ellis needed to purchase some of the adjacent land to build an access road and the police station he had proposed. Hajji Lala, the local warlord, insisted he had that covered. “I kept asking him for the names of the landowners,” Ellis says. “He kept saying, ‘No problem.’ ” But it was a problem. Most of the property in the Zhari district is owned by absentee landlords. When Ellis pressed Hajji Lala for names yet again in late February, he was told, “You’re going to have to find out who owns that land yourself.”

Ellis was crushed. The operation was scheduled for March 10. He had a week, at best, to purchase the property. “But I got it done,” he says. “The thing is, the people really wanted the school opened and they helped me find the owners.” There was one pair of owners who demanded $20,000 for their land. “I told them $2,000 max,” Ellis said, but ultimately the owners — after checking around — changed their minds and decided to offer the land for free. “They said, ‘We’ll give it to you, but could you beat us up a little and make it look like you seized it? The Taliban don’t want this to happen.’ ”

(See pictures of life in the Afghan National Army.)

There were a multitude of elements to put in place. A generator was needed for the security outpost. Blast walls and Hesco baskets — the ubiquitous wire and cloth fortifications filled with rocks and soil — were needed to protect the troops who would be stationed at the school. The local police chief had to be convinced to lend some of his officers for the operation. The plans for clearing the bombs and booby traps had to be specific and plausible.

But 16 hours before the operation was to launch, the 1/12 battalion planning staff scotched it. “They said we hadn’t done sufficient planning for the bomb clearance,” Ellis says, “and I suppose they were right. The trouble is, there are only two American bomb-clearing units for all of Kandahar province. I managed to find a Canadian team.” The operation was rescheduled for April 4, when the Canadians would be available.

When I arrived at Combat Outpost Senjaray on the afternoon of April 2, Ellis had just received terrible news. “You’re not going to believe this, but they just [freakin’] postponed it,” he told me. “The staff at RC-South found this regulation that says you can’t build a security outpost that close to a school. It would endanger the kids.” Ellis was agog. He had briefed the commanding general of RC-South, Nick Carter, on the project, and he was in favor. But General Carter was on leave — and his staff didn’t want to take the risk. Regulations were regulations. “I mean, if we don’t have a strongpoint there, you endanger the kids. Do you think the Taliban are just going to let us … open the [freakin’] school?”

Still, Ellis was confident the operation would go forward. This was just a bureaucratic glitch. Everyone thought so. On April 3, I spoke with Ellis’ immediate superior, Lieut. Colonel Reik Anderson, commander of the 1/12, and with the Canadian in charge of Joint Task Force Kandahar, Brigadier General Daniel Menard, who was furious about the delay. “We’re going to have a letter signed by the district and provincial governors, insisting that we go ahead,” Menard told me, then proceeded to talk like a general. “This is essential. It would be the first nonkinetic breach of Taliban control in the area.”

Lieutenant Reed Peeples, a former Peace Corps volunteer whose 2nd platoon patrolled the area around the school, put it more simply: “For months, we’ve been trying to win over the people of this town — and we haven’t produced anything tangible. They are sitting on the fence, waiting to see which side is stronger. We haven’t had much luck with development projects. We haven’t proved that we can take care of them. Reopening the school would be our first real win.”

See pictures of Defense Secretary Robert Gates in Afghanistan.

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A Conversation
It was unimaginable that the higher-ups — those in “echelons above reality,” as Ellis liked to say — would actually stop the Pir Mohammed project. He figured it would be delayed a day or two and decided to move ahead with his plan. He needed to have some troops in place, in an observation and listening post near the school, on the night before the operation took place. On Sunday, April 4, Ellis joined the 2nd platoon on a patrol to scout locations.

There was a two-story house across the eastern canal from the school that Ellis thought would be perfect, and we proceeded there carefully, in the dusty golden haze of late afternoon. The soldiers handed out pencils, plush toys and cheese crackers to the local kids, who gathered as the patrol snaked slowly through town. The kids, who had seen all these offerings many times before, weren’t satisfied. “Qalam,” they shouted, surrounding me. “Qalam.”

“They want your pen,” Ellis said. “Most of them can’t write. But they know the difference between a pencil and a pen.”

Ellis knocked on the door of the compound in question, and a young man named Habib Rahman answered. We entered a remarkably pleasant courtyard, surrounded by windowed rooms, shaded by grape arbors and balconies. It was clearly one of the more prosperous homes in town, but the source of the prosperity was a mystery. Rahman said his grandfather, who built the place, and his father were both dead. He lived there with his mother, grandmother, aunt and two sisters.

We sat on thin rugs, beneath one of the balconies. Ellis took off his helmet and deftly, gently, always smiling, questioned Rahman. He didn’t ask anything very direct, like how Rahman — who said he was 17 — earned a living, and the boy didn’t volunteer any information. Ellis asked who the most powerful person in town was, and Rahman answered, “Hajji Lala.” He asked who the most powerful Taliban in town was, and the boy said he didn’t know. “Yeah, I wouldn’t know, either, if I were you,” Ellis said.

(See TIME’s photo-essay “A Soldier’s Final Journey Home.”)

He asked if Rahman could give us a tour of the property. He didn’t reveal the purpose of the exploration; he didn’t want to give the Taliban advance warning of his intentions. But, as Ellis expected, the roof of the compound was a perfect observation post. When the tour was done, he asked Rahman why he thought the Americans were in Afghanistan. The boy said he didn’t know. Ellis asked if he had heard about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The boy said no. He asked what Rahman thought about the Americans. “I’ve heard that they bomb civilians from the air,” the boy said. But the Taliban bomb and booby-trap schools, Ellis pointed out. “Why would they do that?” Rahman didn’t know. Ellis asked the boy how he thought the war would end. “Whenever you guys get out from here, things will get better,” he said. “The elders will sit down with the Taliban, and the Taliban will lay down their arms.”

Later, as we headed back to the outpost in the gathering darkness, Ellis said, “Well, at least he knew we were Americans. Some of them still think we’re Russians.

That night, Ellis learned that his superiors had, once again, briefed their superiors at RC-South about the Pir Mohammed School operation. “They want to sleep on it at RC-South,” Ellis said, rolling his eyes. “And battalion said they don’t want me calling up, trying to convince them.”

(See TIME’s audio slide show “The War in Afghanistan Up Close.”)

The next afternoon, Ellis received word from battalion: there would be another delay, ostensibly of five days, but Ellis knew it would be longer than that. The Canadian bomb-disposal unit couldn’t wait around. It had to go on to other projects. “This is becoming a joke,” said one of the troopers who escorted me out of Combat Outpost Senjaray the following day. “It ain’t gonna happen.”

Disaster
A week later, Ellis was still waiting for the operation to be approved, when disaster struck — and a signature Afghan disaster at that. At about 5 a.m. on April 12, an American convoy passing through Senjaray on the Ring Road slowed on the curve in front of Dog Company’s outpost. A passenger bus came up behind the convoy, traveling at a rate of speed the Americans deemed suspicious. The convoy tried to signal the bus to stop; the soldiers apparently used hand signals and pen flares, but fired no warning shots according to the McChrystal protocol. But the bus didn’t stop and the Americans opened fire; five civilians were killed and 18 wounded. Outraged Afghans poured into the streets in Kandahar to protest. Their support for the upcoming battle was becoming more tenuous, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai had said he wouldn’t approve the U.S.-led campaign in Kandahar unless the people wanted it. The fate of Barack Obama’s new Afghan strategy hung in the balance.

(See pictures of the 2009 presidential election in Afghanistan.)

After the wounded were treated and evacuated from Senjaray, Ellis led a patrol into the local bazaar. “The initial mood of the population as we went into the bazaar was hostile,” Ellis e-mailed me that night. “We asked them to follow us to a meeting place so we could talk, but they were not willing. I then went stall to stall in the bazaar and met with groups of elders. I explained the following: ‘I have fought for many years now and seen my own Soldiers and the enemy killed and it never has affected me as much as this event this morning. The thing that pains me the most is that the people killed were innocent people that were caught in a dangerous situation. You know, from our past, that my Soldiers will put themselves into harm’s way before endangering your lives, because that is our responsibility as Soldiers … to keep the fight away from your businesses and your homes.’ I covered my heart and said, ” ‘I wish to God that I could undo the things that happened this morning, but nothing ever will.’ ”

Ellis said he thought he had gotten through to the elders. Two days later, he received word that the Pir Mohammed School project was finally approved.

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