Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan

Dana Burde

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231537513
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Foreign-backed funding for education does not always stabilize a country and enhance its statebuilding efforts. Dana Burde shows how aid to education in Afghanistan bolstered conflict both deliberately in the 1980s through violence-infused, anti-Soviet curricula and inadvertently in the 2000s through misguided stabilization programs. She also reveals how dominant humanitarian models that determine what counts as appropriate aid have limited attention and resources toward education, in some cases fueling programs that undermine their goals.

For education to promote peace in Afghanistan, Burde argues we must expand equal access to quality community-based education and support programs that increase girls' and boys' attendance at school. Referring to a recent U.S. effort that has produced strong results in these areas, Burde commends the program's efficient administration and good quality, and its neutral curriculum, which can reduce conflict and build peace in lasting ways. Drawing on up-to-date research on humanitarian education work amid conflict zones around the world and incorporating insights gleaned from extensive fieldwork in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Burde recalculates and improves a popular formula for peace.

1

Introduction

ON MY FIRST TRIP TO PAKISTAN, in spring 2005, I visited several Afghan refugee camps in Balochistan, close to the Afghan border. I was working as a consultant for Save the Children, a US-based international nongovernmental organization that for a decade had been supporting schools for Afghan refugees living in these camps. Save the Children had hired me to assess their education programs, as their work was coming to a close. The camps had been there for many years—most of them since the early 1980s, when the Soviet invasion prompted a mass exodus of refugees from Afghanistan. “Camp” was a misnomer: each was really its own village, with clusters of mud-brick houses that seemed to have grown from the beige sand and earth that surrounded them. In each, I met with students, teachers, administrators, and members of the school management committee to discuss the schools and the interviewees’ educational aspirations. One of the boys in Girdi Jungle, the largest camp I visited, spoke clearly and articulately about the importance of education in his life: “It’s so important,” he said, “that I will go all the way to China to get educated if I have to.”

It was my first foray into a highly observant Muslim society, and I knew little about the relationship between Islam and education. The comment struck me as unusually sophisticated for a twelve-year-old boy in the fourth grade. Yet I heard the same sentiment, expressed repeatedly and in virtually identical language, the following year when I was collecting survey data from illiterate Afghan villagers living in remote areas of the Panjshir Valley. It was then that I learned that this commitment to education was drawn from a famous hadith, widely known among Muslims around the world.* Afghans of all ethnicities—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks—regardless of their level of literacy, learn and recite phrases from the Qur’an and the hadiths.^† Most Afghans are deeply committed to educating their boys and girls, both because they believe it is a religious obligation and because they understand that success in the modern world hinges on education. They refer to “education for the soul” and “education for the world” to distinguish these two roles for schooling. Education for the soul refers to religious education and acquisition of knowledge for spiritual development that is intended to ensure an active and fulfilling afterlife. Education for the world—sometimes also called “worldly education”—refers to the study of subjects such as mathematics and science that leads to the acquisition of skills necessary to work and prosper in this world (Burde 2008; Khan 2012).

FIGURE 1.1 Map of Afghanistan Provinces

Many Americans are surprised to learn of the role of education in Islam and the importance Afghans place on learning. They often assume that Afghans find it threatening, preferring to keep their children away from modernizing influences such as schools. The Taliban’s notorious refusal to allow girls to attend school during their reign in the 1990s received broad media attention and reinforced this impression. Despite the publicity accorded the many women and girls who flouted the prohibition, at the risk of grave danger to themselves, the Taliban’s mandates were thought to reflect a widespread conservatism dominant in rural Afghanistan, particularly among the Pashtun population from which the Taliban emerged.

This perspective was encapsulated in a conversation I had with a US military officer in New York in 2010 about our respective experiences working in Afghanistan. He had seldom encountered educators or thought about local schooling during his time there, and was surprised to hear of my research on community-based schools. I noted that many Afghans consider education essential to improving their lives. After reflecting for a moment, he recalled a military meeting he had attended in Kandahar—a predominately Pashtun province—with a group of local Afghan elders. He described how they had been sitting around a table in the thick of intense negotiations when a delivery arrived. The men broke up the meeting and rushed to receive the package. The officer thought it contained something instrumental to their meeting or critically important to their lives. “They were yelling and carrying on with so much excitement, I couldn’t imagine what it could be,” he told me. “It turned out that in this package there was a delivery of new textbooks for primary school children. One of these old guys explained to me, ‘I’ve been waiting for a textbook to give to my grandson. I wasn’t able to go to school. He is now enrolled.’ It was funny to see these tough old guys with turbans and big beards jumping up and down, giggling with excitement over children’s textbooks.”

The enormously popular book Three Cups of Tea and its successor Stones into Schools went to some lengths to dispel the notion that Afghans—even in conservative rural regions—undervalue education, particularly education for girls. These best sellers recount a US mountaineer’s rededication of his life to building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Trekking down from a high peak in northern Pakistan, he loses his way. When he stumbles sick and exhausted into a village, the inhabitants take care of him, nursing him back to health. Upon recovery, the climber promises to return to the village to build a school, since the village children desperately need one. He encounters many setbacks, but keeps his promise and builds not one but many schools in the impoverished region, returning many times over a number of years.

The first book casts the adventurer, Greg Mortenson, in a postcolonial redemption narrative; he brings the gift of modern education to the needy but dignified natives, in return for the gifts they have bestowed upon him—health and native wisdom. In this story, education, particularly for girls, is the promoter of peace that arrives in an act of beneficence. Although the success of these books went far toward countering conventional ideas among Americans as to the status of girls’ education among rural Afghans, at the same time they fostered a simplistic narrative of US-Afghan relations—an uplifting account of the role of Americans in the region, who with a few pennies can build schools, educate Afghans, prevent conflict, and foster peace.

Mortenson and his books have been roundly criticized in the media, most notably in a 60 Minutes broadcast of April 2011, an exposé mainly of financial malfeasance and fictionalization of segments of a story that had been billed as nonfiction. To those living and working in the region, however, the books were equally jarring for their geopolitical inaccuracies and lack of serious attention to education. In particular, there is scant discussion of the schools’ curriculum, of teacher training, or of specifics regarding a key issue that the program claims to address—“sustainability,” that is, enduring support to education given weak governmental administration. Moreover, the reader is left with the impression that Mortenson is the first—and only—person to promote girls’ education in these remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, local and international NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) have been supporting girls’ education in the region for decades, often successfully, and braving all kinds of dangers to do so.¹

However, neither the conventional wisdom articulated in journalism and stories like Mortenson’s nor the more nuanced view promulgated within international humanitarian circles captures correctly the way education is related to conflict or peace. Conventional wisdom, on the one hand, assumes a simple, unidirectional relationship: “more education equals less conflict,” as articulated clearly in Mortenson’s books. The dominant humanitarian paradigm, on the other hand, favors ostensibly more urgent or less controversial forms of aid, downplaying education aid as only effective once peace has been restored.

Despite this attention to education in the popular press and among practitioners, the vast majority of political scientists and scholars of peace and conflict studies neglect education in their analyses of conflict. Indeed, from 1994 to 2010, only 1 percent of articles in peace and conflict-studies journals and 0.5 percent of articles in international-studies journals addressed educational practice outside North America and Europe (King 2014).² Scholarship that explores state-building and peace-building would appear to have a strong motivation to understand education, since the establishment of an educational system that provides equal access to citizens is a key ingredient of democratic state formation. However, education has received limited attention even within these specialized subfields. Scholars studying state-building focus on the way external interventions can stabilize a state after conflict, but education makes only an incidental appearance in their analyses, which emphasize instead institutions related to justice, security, and the economy (Paris 2004; Hehir and Robinson 2007; Paris and Sisk 2009). Typically, conflict-studies and civil-war literature have assumed material interests as drivers of state or individual behavior. Education has been included in this model only occasionally (Mundy and Dryden-Peterson 2011a; King 2014).

There is a small but burgeoning literature within international and comparative education studies that focuses on countries affected by conflict, but most of this examines theoretical links between education and conflict (e.g., Davies 2004; Nelles 2004). While practitioners focus on how education may contribute to peace-building, this work often lacks theoretical analysis or empirical backing. Empirical data on which research on the relationship between education and conflict might be based is especially limited (Mundy and Dryden-Peterson 2011b).

At the same time, the US government has never fully understood the role that education plays in Afghanistan or the importance it holds for most Afghans. US education policy in Afghanistan shifted from promoting “jihad literacy” in the 1980s to “education for stabilization” in the 2000s, and most official support for education was withdrawn in the intervening years. The use of education as a strategic tool—first to inculcate habits of war among the mujahideen in the 1980s and then to support the pacification of communities considered hostile to the US-backed Afghan government—has likely contributed to underlying conditions for conflict.

Historically, in fact, outside actors have taken three flawed approaches to providing aid to education in countries at war, each of which can be counterproductive to efforts to build a sustainable peace. First, education has been neglected. Humanitarians have frequently overlooked the importance education holds for populations affected by conflict, not considering it a basic need that warrants a humanitarian response or perceiving it as political activity in the context of work that is meant to be apolitical. When support to education is included as part of humanitarian aid packages, it is often as an afterthought or in a way that does not consider how it might interact with conditions that lead to conflict. This is beginning to change, in part because strong states have recently enlisted education as key to stabilizing weak states and thus fighting militancy and extremism, but support to education still lags behind other humanitarian initiatives. As I discuss later, without adequate resources dedicated to education for the sake of humanitarian assistance, important pathways to conflict can remain open.

Second, aid to education has been employed to support politically expedient goals that do not necessarily include peace. For example, the US used support to education to enhance its war efforts in Afghanistan in the 1980s. US-funded curricula were designed to teach Afghan children to hate the Soviets and support the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets and the Soviet-backed Afghan government. Unlike in situations where education is overlooked altogether, this flawed approach is actually intended to spur conflict in the short term, with unpredictable long-term consequences.

Third, even moderately well-funded and politically neutral education programs can go awry if they are implemented unequally or unfairly. US efforts to stabilize Afghanistan in the twenty-first century, subservient to US military strategy, may unintentionally aggravate local grievances by exacerbating inequalities between ethnicities and clans. Uneven support that denies education to some peaceful groups while providing it to groups perceived to be hostile to the government raises intergroup tensions and may reduce faith in the Afghan national and local governments’ right and ability to govern. While low levels of governmental legitimacy and high levels of “horizontal inequality” (inequality between groups) may not be sufficient to produce conflict, they increase the likelihood of violence.

In contrast to these approaches, neutral, reasonably good-quality education, supported thoughtfully and systematically and with humanitarian assistance rather than politico-military advantage as the goal, has the potential to mitigate conflict and promote peace. This type of aid to education should be provided uniformly across communities, rather than as a reward to restive communities that exhibit a desired response to an occupying force.

In this book, I provide a systematic analysis of the relationship between education and conflict, tracing how these four different approaches have been applied in Afghanistan as the rationale for aid has shifted from a policy of benign neglect, to an effort to support war, to an effort to mitigate conflict. Using this history as a case study, I explore how foreign intervention in education can contribute either to conflict or to peace. I argue that instead of preventing conflict, US aid to education in Afghanistan has contributed to it—deliberately in the 1980s, with violence-infused, anti-Soviet curricula, and inadvertently in the 2000s, with misguided stabilization programs. In both of these phases, education aid was subordinated to the political goals of strong states and used as a strategic tool—a situation made possible in part by humanitarians’ tendency to neglect education’s role in conflict. However, I also show how US aid to education can yet support peace. Although this is possible in Afghanistan, I argue that it cannot be achieved simply by building more schools. Rather, expanding access to good quality community-based education is necessary to overcome obstacles to peace. To assess the relative successes and failures of the various endeavors that constitute the case history, I draw from on-the-ground field research in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2013, interviews with education-aid workers in the region, and private archives, as well as two decades of personal experience working on education in countries affected by conflict.

The flawed approaches to aid to education described in this book may in part reflect problems inherent to administering any type of humanitarian assistance. However, as I argue below, the detrimental effects of bad education policy should be of particular concern. Few institutions can have such a pervasive and enduring effect on the individuals with whom they interact as a nation’s educational system. At the same time, the focus on education in this book should not be read as questioning the importance of other types of aid. Rather, it is a call to reframe the dominant understanding of the place of education in humanitarian and peace-building efforts.

The Importance of Education

The power of education to transform individuals socially and economically should not be underestimated. That power may, in fact, be more important in less literate societies, where literacy is often described as a light in the dark. In my work, interviewees from countries as varied as Guatemala, Mali, and Afghanistan have used the metaphor of light to describe the transformation that occurs when one moves from illiteracy to literacy (others report similar data, e.g., Frye 2012). Likewise, desire for the benefits that education can bring is overwhelming—social and economic status accrues to those who are educated. Many researchers remark on the reverence with which education is viewed in developing countries, particularly as compared to the attitudes of Americans toward their own education (e.g., Anderson-Levitt 2003). This may be in part because in societies with fewer educated people, those who are educated have historically experienced significant economic and social rewards.

Education is not only a tool for individual enhancement, it is also a key instrument of the state. Indeed, education plays a singular role in mediating between the state and its citizens. States use schools to create national identity, train a work force, and cultivate a particular form of citizenship. Education develops the human resources that boost the economy. In addition, a well-educated work force leads to a better distribution of wealth, or, in other words, to more equitable economic growth (Hojman 1996; Londono 1996 cited in Thyme 2006:734). A national curriculum inculcates a collective understanding of identity, social norms, and a shared sense of purpose (Heyneman 2003; UNESCO 2004, 2011; Dupuy 2008). In developing countries, schools are typically the most prevalent government institution in rural—and sometimes even urban—areas, outnumbering health clinics, police stations, and post offices. For many children, attending school constitutes their earliest and most frequent contact with the state, as represented by teachers, textbooks, and school buildings (Rose and Greeley 2006). Because of the broad and deep contact citizens have with schooling, education is a critical component of any effort to create social change. Thus, interventions in education that are designed to promote peace—or conflict—can have disproportionately large effects.

Education, Politics, and Conflict in Afghanistan

Education is important in Afghanistan, for all of these reasons, but to dispel the popular myths that say otherwise, it is important first to review education’s role in modern Afghan history.³ Most Afghans do not reject education, though their attitude toward it has been influenced by the fact that education has been manipulated as a key vehicle for inculcating religious adherence and for maintaining the power of those who transmit it. Religion permeates every aspect of Afghan society, and reading or studying the Qur’an is a fundamental element of religious expression and a requirement of Islam. Because the Qur’an is in Arabic, comprehension is a problem for many Afghans, most of whom are native speakers of Pashto or Dari. Still, reading, reciting, and memorizing are critical aspects of religious embodiment (Boyle 2006), and village mullahs (religious leaders) are essential to this process. Afghanistan has always been a rural society; even today, as much as 75 percent of the population lives in villages, most of these with five hundred inhabitants or fewer (Thier 2008). Every village has a mosque, and nearly every mosque has a mullah who calls villagers to prayer, manages the affairs of the village, and runs a small religious school.⁴ The mullah is typically the most literate person in the village and often the only educated person in the village.⁵ In the absence of the state—most villages do not have government schools—mullahs monopolize education through the mosque schools that by the early 1900s were prevalent throughout rural Afghanistan.⁶ With this monopoly comes power, respect, a modest income, and a relatively comfortable lifestyle—since mullahs live from villagers’ donations and do not need to farm the land, although many maintain small plots of their own. In addition to social standing, mullahs’ control over education conveys religious authority, and in a profoundly religious society religious authority can be difficult to challenge.

For this reason, education has often been at the center of power struggles in Afghanistan. Historically, the most comprehensive and ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Time Line: Education in Modern Afghan History
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Humanitarian Action and the Neglect of Education
• 3. Jihad Literacy
• 4. Education for Stability
• 5. Education for the World
• 6. Conclusion: Education as Hope
• Notes
• References
• Index