If you're interested in a little slice of life about what's going on on the ground in Afghanistan, here's a good read by, believe it or not, Joe Klein. This week's Time cover story about a straight leg Army rifle company trying to reopen a school somewhere out in hicksvillestan. I am forced to give props to Joe for this one. It's long, but worth a read.
[...] 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?
Their first project was to refurbish an irrigation canal.
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. [...]
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[...] Well, as it happened both Hajji Lala and the police chief owned farmland just south of the proposed canal. [...]
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"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." [...]
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.
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.' "
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.
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.
The Taliban are almost as big a problem as U.S. and NATO brass.
It will take a hundred years to change anything of significance in that land. It would work better and be cheaper to move the Afghan population to Detroit.
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