Taleban, as readers are probably aware, is Arabic for “students.” It is a damning contradiction of the movement that it would force schools to close and kidnap or threaten to kill teachers who turn up for classes. But that is exactly what its resurgent forces have been doing. It is not just girls’ schools and women teachers that are the target; boys’ schools are being burned, their teachers killed and boys warned against attending class. Recently President Karzai said that some 300,000 children were not in school because of the insurgency. According to the latest reports, some 50 schools in Ghazni province, where the Taleban are active, are now closed because of threats; 10,000 pupils there are being denied schooling. Of course, there is a reason for the Taleban’s war on education. It does not want Afghan boys to broaden their minds (and it is only boys they think should be given any sort of education at all). It wants Afghans to be ignorant and narrow-minded. That way, it thinks it can keep them in its power.
The contrast with what is happening in Saudi Arabia could not be starker. In the past two-and-a-half years, billions of riyals have been channeled into ensuring a highly skilled and motivated work force for the future. Thousands of new schools, dozens of new training institutes and colleges and some ten government-funded world-class universities and almost as many private ones are being built. Others are planned. Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and leading Saudi figures understand that without a trained work force, with all the high-tech skills that advanced economies require, any hope of substantially diversifying the economy and providing jobs for a rapidly expanding population will be stillborn; the Kingdom will remain otherwise dependent on the outside world for skilled labor, the bulk of its imports and much of its services. Education is the answer — the only answer — to ensure a prosperous and economically dynamic Islamic state.
Surely that is what Muslims everywhere in the world want for their countries? It is certainly what the overwhelming majority of Indonesians want, what Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Moroccans, Chadians, Senegalese and millions upon millions of other practicing Muslims around the world want. It is what most Afghans want. But not the Taleban and other obscurantist fellow travelers, who want to ignore science and technology as if they had no place in the Divine Plan.
But there is also a bright side for Afghanistan as well. Despite the Taleban’s hatred for it, education is one of the Afghan success stories. Three hundred thousand Afghan children may be prevented from going to school, but compared to 2001, the year the Taleban were overthrown when just 750,000 children went to school, nearly ten times that number do so now. Moreover, despite the Taleban’s attacks, the figure is up by a million compared to two years ago. Afghan families want their children to be educated. The world, particularly the world media, likes to concentrate on the bad news coming out of Afghanistan. There is also good news and it deserves to be noticed as well.
