Word: senjaray
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Dates: during 2010-2010
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...