Word: lateraling
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...