Word: kandahar
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...