SENJERAY, Afghanistan — Over the past six months, U.S. troops have wrested the school away from insurgents. They’ve hired Afghan contractors to rebuild it and lost blood defending it.
But the tiny school has yet to open, and nobody’s quite sure when it will.
American commanders have called the Pir Mohammed primary school “the premier development project” in Zhari district, a Taliban heartland in Kandahar province at the center of President Barack Obama’s 30,000-troop surge.
The small brick and stone complex represents much of what American forces are trying to achieve in Afghanistan: winning over a war-weary population, tying a people to their estranged government, bolstering Afghan forces so American troops can go home.
But the struggle to open Pir Mohammed three years after the Taliban closed it shows the obstacles U.S. forces face in a complex counterinsurgency fight whose success depends not on firepower but on the support of a terrified people.
Similar battles are taking place across the country. In Marjah, for example, a former Taliban stronghold in neighboring Helmand province, several schools have opened since American-led troops overran the district in February. But many parents are too afraid of violence and Taliban threats to let their children attend.
In Senjeray, too, “there are teachers . . . and we’ve found them and talked to them,” said Capt. Nick Stout, a company commander from the 101st Airborne Division’s 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment. “We say, ‘When the school’s built, do you want to come teach?’ And they say, ‘No, no, I don’t, not at all.’ “
Taliban attacked school
Perched amid mountain crags at the base of a fertile river valley, the village of Senjeray resembles a walled fort, 10,000 people living in a labyrinth of steep, hardened mud walls.
Pir Mohammed sits at the southeastern edge of the village, a pair of modest, single-story buildings that once served hundreds, maybe thousands of children.
Canadians finished the school and opened it in 2005. But in 2007, Taliban fighters attacked it, breaking windows and busting doors off hinges. They took away a dozen students, cut the fingers off some and killed the parents of others, said Bismallah Qari, a 30-year-old black-bearded mullah from Senjeray.
The Taliban opposes Western-style education and apparently saw the school as a symbol of government authority.
Since then, Senjeray’s children have had only one place to go: a handful of Islamic madrassas run by conservative mullahs like Qari that some American commanders say are radicalizing a new generation of Afghan youths.
Speaking through an interpreter as American troops searched a recently filled hole in his madrassa they suspected held a weapons cache, Qari said he wanted his kids to attend Pir Mohammed, too, but “we can’t do it.”
Battle to secure building
When Stout’s unit arrived in May, he deployed two platoons to protect the school around the clock. On their second day, a U.S. soldier was shot in the lung but survived. For weeks, firefights erupted almost daily.
U.S. engineers knocked down walls and trees nearby where insurgents hide. Afghan security forces set up checkpoints on surrounding roads. And armored American trucks stood guard to defend the school’s crumbling outer walls.
Despite months of fighting, the Americans have readied the school to open. They hired Afghan contractors to paint stone walls and install new windows and latrines that together cost about $70,000. They also spent about $150,000 on security.
But building a school like Pir Mohammed “is not just putting in windows and whatnot,” Stout said. “Building is people actually buying into it.”
American commanders no longer speak of military victory. The goal is to push the Taliban far enough away so teachers and children and can attend without fear of firefights or reprisals.
A recent U.S. operation has accomplished much of that: many Taliban fighters have fled Zhari, along with thousands of residents — some of whose abandoned homes were bulldozed or destroyed because they were booby-trapped by insurgent mines.
But convincing residents the school is truly safe is going to be “another battle,” Stout said.
“If we can create an environment where neither of us interfere with their lives, that’s winning for us,” he said. “And that’s what the people want. They don’t like us. But they don’t like the Taliban either.”
For now, the American strategy appears to be working. Hundreds of people line up daily at the U.S. hilltop outpost for a cash-for-work program, something they would not have dared do just a few weeks earlier.
But the Taliban is not gone. On Nov. 1, a motorcycle bomber blew himself up at the entrance to Stout’s base, killing two American soldiers.
The school was attacked the same day. It has yet to open.
