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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...
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...
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...
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...
"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...