WASHINGTON, 5 April 2004 — Yunus Qanooni, the Afghan minister of education, is one of that country’s new generation of leaders. The youngest member of President Hamid Karzai’s government at 47, Qanooni is the military and political heir to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance commander assassinated by Al-Qaeda two days before the Sept. 11 attacks. Frequently mentioned as a future president, Qanooni is charismatic and articulate. His thinking is quick, his vision is large and he gets things done. He’ll need those skills and more as he attempts to rebuild the devastated Afghan school system.
Afghanistan has little money for reconstruction of any kind; the funds that nations and philanthropies promised soon after the fall of the Taleban in large part failed to materialize. Last Wednesday, at a donors’ conference in Berlin, Karzai said his country would need $28 billion over the next seven years to fully recover from decades of war, and Secretary of State Colin Powell increased the US pledge for next year to $2.2 billion. Still, this is stingy compared with the $18.6 billion that Washington has allocated for Iraqi reconstruction in 2004. The more than $4.4 billion that donor nations pledged in Berlin is a reason for optimism. But the country still lacks the means to engage in the methods of nation-building that tend to work: namely economic development, the establishment of a strong government and military, and calls to a common culture or heritage. Afghanistan is fractured by ethnic, linguistic and political differences, which means there is no common culture to build upon.
I was invited to Kabul last fall by the Education Ministry to examine the prospects for remaking the education system. It was a homecoming of sorts. For 25 years following World War II, Columbia’s Teachers College worked with the Afghan government to create a national education system. Together, we developed teachers’ colleges, designed the curriculum and wrote textbooks. It was, to my knowledge, the longest partnership in the college’s history. We left when the government was overthrown in 1978. After the fall of the Taleban, the ministry and UNICEF invited the college back to join them as partners in the rebuilding. After a week in the country, I signed an agreement accepting their offer — in essence signing on for what any betting man would consider a high-risk venture. Afghanistan has little choice but to try something that no country has ever accomplished — jump-starting the process of nation-building through its education system. As a method of social change, education is effective but exceedingly slow. It takes nine years to educate a single age group and far longer before those children have influential positions in society. But it seems to me that Afghanistan has no other card to play.
Qanooni sees a common public education system as a powerful vehicle for rescuing a “vulnerable and traumatized’’ generation, and overcoming the divisive powers of geography, ethnicity and language in a country torn by tribalism and the rule of warlords. The country’s literacy rate is 31 percent overall, and only 15 percent for women. Education could produce the human capacity to develop the economy, as in India, Algeria, Rwanda and Jordan. And it could improve the status of women and begin to combat abuse, child mortality, poverty and overpopulation.
A rebuilt education system could help establish the civic culture needed to stabilize a region with porous borders that has been a home to terrorism, nearly a quarter-century of war and radical fundamentalist revolution. Progress in developing this system might even be a means of further inspiring donor nations and philanthropists to support Afghanistan.
Rebuilding the education system will be, of course, only a beginning. Afghanistan will also need resources for job creation, economic diversification and expansion, security, environmental cleanup and infrastructure reconstruction.
Qanooni knows this will not be easy. But in a recent fundraising trip to New York and Washington, he spoke of the rapid progress he and his government have made in moving the education agenda forward. He has developed an ambitious, but not impossible, 12-year plan to establish gender equity and graduation rates of 90 percent from ninth grade. In just two years, more than 4 million children have enrolled in school, the largest number in Afghan history. A third of Afghanistan’s girls, previously barred by the Taleban, are attending. Hundreds of schools were rebuilt in the past year; 8,500 tent schools were opened. Textbooks were rewritten, with a national orientation, excising the ideologies of the past. Gone is the Taleban math that used to permeate the lessons of even the youngest children: 1 Kalishnikov + 2 Kalishnikovs = 3 Kalishnikovs.
With a new curriculum and textbooks that stress a single nation, the Ministry of Education is creating a common vision of Afghanistan and a single national identity for the coming generations who will eventually lead the country. The curriculum stresses bilingual study in the country’s two primary languages (Pashto and Dari), religious instruction and Afghan literature texts. Already 50,000 teachers, out of a total of 120,000, have taken short courses on how to teach the new curriculum, according to the ministry and UNICEF. This is an extraordinary record, as far as I know unmatched by any other country.
That type of early, measurable progress gave me real hope, when I was in Kabul, that the country’s new education strategy might succeed. The challenges are staggering: Four million children, fully half of the nation’s school-age population, are not yet enrolled in classes, including two-thirds of Afghanistan’s girls.
