Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is perfectly clear. Everyone has a right to an education. And yet after seven years of brutal war in Afghanistan, education and schools in the Helmand district have plummeted to an all time low as the Taliban regain momentum and influence. "Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan," reads the very first sentence of a report (pdf) by the Atlantic Council of the United States earlier this year.
The Taliban claim to support education but obviously under their terms. A Taliban spokesman had the following to say – "Many changes have been made to the textbooks in other schools. For instance, the letter A used to be for Allah but in these textbooks A is used for "anar' [pomegranate]. J used to be for Jihad, but these books have J for "jowar' [maize]. We do not permit such changes." To prove the point, the deputy head of education in Helmand, Taj Mohammed, says 34 schools have since been closed and 64 torched in the past four years. Anti-government militants reportedly murdered seventeen students and teachers.
No future, disenfranchised, uneducated, and unemployed. This is what the children and youth of the Helmand district have to face. For the Taliban, it represents a potential repository of fresh recruits as Kabul scrambles to fulfill the conditions and agendas from 60 donors , from both nations and international organizations.
However, all is not lost. According to a 2007 report (pdf) by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), non-formal education initiatives are being implemented on a community and home-based levels targeting the unemployed and the youth. It's unclear in the report if indeed such programs are effectively being implemented in Helmand. Though the report does mention stratagems for evaluation, it also remains ambivalent on how one goes about quantifying its effectiveness outside Kabul.
