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Michael Yon: Education and Challenges in Afghanistan |
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Wednesday, 14 January 2009 |
pThis is a great interview with General David Petraeus:/pblockquotepstrongGen. David Petraeus:/strong In looking at which lessons learned in Iraq might be applicable in Afghanistan, it is important to remember a key principle of counterinsurgency operations: Every case is unique. That is certainly true of Afghanistan (just as it was true, of course, in Iraq). While general concepts that proved important in Iraq may be applicable in Afghanistan—concepts such as the importance of securing and serving the population and the necessity of living among the people to secure them—the application of those ‘big ideas’ has to be adapted to Afghanistan./ppa href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4587page=3" target="_blank"Please Click here/a to read the entire interview on emForeign Policy.com/em/p/blockquotepnbsp;/pAlso, Dexter Filkins wrote a fine piece regarding girls returning to school after the acid attacks in Afghanistan:br /br /blockquote“Are you going to school?”br /br /Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read.br /br /But if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others — students and teachers — was meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, it appears to have completely failed.br /br /a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/world/asia/14kandahar.html" target="_blank"Please Click here/a to read the entire article on the emnytimes.com/embr //blockquotepbr /Despite my own general misgivings about Afghanistan, there definitely are points of light. Dexter's story provides another glimpse. More girls are going to school, for instance.br /br /In regard to long-term education goals, it would seem important that we help facilitate training in a major language such as English or French. If a kid is literate in Pashto, what difference does it make when it comes to entering and accessing the larger world? Literacy in Dari can be helpful because Dari readers can more easily access the world through the Farsi language highway (but the Farsi highway passes largely through the Iranian filter, which might not be particularly helpful to us). It seems that flooding Afghanistan with English learning materials would be in everyone's best interest. /pbr /p{loadposition user8}/pdiv class="feedflare"
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