The University of Nebraska and Afghanistan

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/schools.html

Back to school in Afghanistan

CBC News Online | January 27, 2004

When 1.5 million children went back in school in Afghanistan in the spring of 2002, a tough lesson was waiting for them. While the country welcomed some semblance of peace for the first time in years, war remained very much a part of its classrooms. Afghanistan's teachers tried to erase war images from the textbooks, images that got there in the first place due in large part to Cold War policies in the United States.

Getting children back to school is a number one priority in Afghanistan's post war government. But the big question is: what will they learn?

Math teachers use bullets as props to teach lessons in subtraction. This isn't their idea. During decades of war, the classroom has been the best place to indoctrinate young people with their duty to fight. Government-sponsored textbooks in Afghanistan are filled with violence. For years, war was the only lesson that counted.

The Mujahideen, Afghanistan's freedom fighters, used the classroom to prepare children to fight the Soviet empire. The Russians are long gone but the textbooks are not. The Mujahideen had wanted to prepare the next generation of Afghans to fight the enemy, so pupils learned the proper clips for a Kalashnikov rifle, the weight of bombs needed to flatten a house, and how to calculate the speed of bullets. Even the girls learn it.

But the Mujahideen had a lot of help to create this warrior culture in the school system from the United States, which paid for the Mujahideen propaganda in the textbooks. It was all part of American Cold War policy in the 1980s, helping the Mujahideen defeat the Soviet army on Afghan soil.

The University of Nebraska was front and center in that effort. The university did the publishing and had an Afghan study center and a director who was ready to help defeat the "Red Menace."

"I think Ronald Reagan himself felt that this was a violation of the rights of the Afghans," says Tom Goutier, who was behind the Mujahideen textbook project. "I think a lot of those working for him thought this was an opportunity for us to do the Soviet Union some damage."

[Buzz Clik]

1. One gets the impression that the author of that article thinks the Soviet influence was a good thing

Damn.

Propaganda sucks, but damn.

[LiberalAndProud]

3. My impression was that the author of that article thinks children

shouldn't have to grow up in war. I tend to agree with him.

[Buzz Clik]

5. It's hard to disagree with that.

[Oregone]

4. Was the Soviet influence more damaging than the US influence aimed at destroying it?

The chickens are coming home to roost, and the "Any Means to the Ends" argument isn't holding water as of late. Those children grew up, and its who the US is fighting now.

[Flaneur]

6. You might want to read some Afghan history.

I think any Afghans old enough to remember would consider the 1970s the good old days. It's been pure shit ever since.

[LiberalAndProud]

2. So sad.

Rashid loves school but he says he and the other boys don't understand why their books are filled with war.

Rashid
Eleven-year-old Rashid lives in Kabul. His father returned from where the family was hiding one day to check on their apartment and he was shot dead. His country has been at war for his entire life.

"And in other countries have peace and Afghanistan, why Afghanistan haven't peace? I think with myself, why Afghanistan haven't peace?" he says. "And my mother say to me, there's no country to help Afghanistan."

The boys go to school in the afternoon when the girls go home. Rashid loves school but he says he and the other boys don't understand why their books are filled with war.

"The Afghan people hate the wars," he says. "This is big mistake to war. This war is not good to small boys and their books."

The teachers at Rashid's school agree. They say the books must change, that nobody is happy that they're being used in school, not teachers, not students.