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    the budget..., 2007-02-22 15:09:13 | Main | more shocking revelations..., 2007-02-27 19:18:28

    i wonder where they got this idea:

    HRW reports:

    Beginning in late 2005, armed groups, including the Taliban, sharply increased attacks against schools and teachers to instill terror in ordinary Afghans and contest the authority of the central government. From January 2005 to June 21, 2006, Human Rights Watch documented more than 200 incidents of teachers and students being killed or threatened, and schools being blown up or burned down.

    These attacks have forced many schools to close, and made it nearly impossible to open new schools. Where schools do remain open, parents are often afraid to send their children—in particular girls—to school.

    Under the Taliban, girls were denied the right to attend school. After the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, school enrollment increased dramatically, as large numbers of girls enrolled. However, growing insecurity has derailed, and in many cases, reversed this progress. In March 2006, President Karzai stated that some 100,000 Afghan children who had gone to school in 2003 and 2004 no longer went to school.

    Statfor offers by way of explanation:

    Part of NATO and the U.S.-led coalition's reconstruction effort has been on rebuilding schools in Afghanistan's small towns and villages. The schools, like other reconstruction projects in the country, therefore, are seen as local symbols of the U.S.-backed central government in Kabul, and the Taliban and their allies consider those who send their children to these schools as tacitly supporting the government. That, however, is just one of the reasons the militants have included education-related entities among their list of targets.

    Another is that jihadists oppose secular education in any form, so those government schools and teachers in the Afghan countryside -- schools that are going so far as to educate girls -- represent a direct threat to the jihadist ideology. Indeed, the Taliban first formed in religious schools, so their leadership is especially sensitive to the possibility that a solid opposition could grow out of the schools as well. As a result, more than 200 schools were attacked and more than 20 teachers killed in 2006. In conjunction with this intimidation campaign, the Taliban announced in January that they would establish their own schools, ostensibly as an alternative to the secular government schools.

    Charlie Wilson's War, p.335:

    [In the fall of 1985] the mujahideen in the Pakistani training camps were not only receiving a flood of lethal weapons, they were also being trained to wage a war of urban terror, with instructin in car bombings, bicycle bombings, camel bombings, and assassination.

    Just how vicious a campaign the CIA was sponsoring is suggested by the Pakistani brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, who directed the training with and distribution of CIA weapons at that time. In a matter-of-fact passage in his memoirs, he describes the range of assassination tactics and targets he was preparing the mujahideen to take on in Kabul. They ranged from your everyday "knife between the shoulder blades of a Soviet soldier shopping in the bazaar"to "the placing of a briefcase bomb in a senior official's office." Educational institutions were considered fair game, he explains, since they were staffed by "Communists indoctrinating their students with Marxist dogma."

    [emph. added]

    I wonder if the Taliban will be asking us to give them their textbooks back, sounds like they'll be needing them.


:: posted by buermann @ 2007-02-26 20:00:16 CST | link





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