U.S. fights to open school in Taliban area

[unhappycamper]

n this photograph taken Sept. 10, 2010, Afghan soldiers eat a meal at their outpost beside the Pir Mohammed school, in Zhari district, Kandahar province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan. Over the last 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.


U.S. fights to open school in Taliban area
By TODD PITMAN
The Associated Press
Sunday, December 5, 2010; 12:05 AM

SENJERAY, Afghanistan -- Over the last 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-man 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 - one 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 still too afraid of violence and Taliban threats to let their children attend.

[SoCalDem]

1. Build it a million times & the Taliban will knock it down a million & 1 times

Subversive "in-home" schooling of at least one generation is what is necessary, but in countries where women fear men, that is unlikely to happen.

In societies where men leave the home every day to work, women have an opportunity to teach children. Afghanistan is not like that (except maybe in Kabul).