At Antiwar.com, Sam Koritz blogs the following about U.S. government support for education in Taliban-run Afghanistan:
During the U.S.-Taliban era of cooperation from 1994 to 1998 … a key Unocal consultant was a University of Nebraska academic named Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies there. During and after the Afghan jihad, Gouttierre’s center secured more than $60 million in federal grants for “educational” programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although the funding for Gouttierre’s work was funneled through the State Department’s Agency for International Development, the CIA was its sponsor. And it turned out that Gouttierre’s education program consisted of blatant Islamist propaganda, including the creation of children’s textbooks in which young Afghanis were taught to count by enumerating dead Russian soldiers and adding up Kalashnikov rifles, all of it imbued with Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric. [Italics mine — CHF] The Taliban liked Gouttierre’s work so much that they continued to use the textbooks he created, and when a delegation of Taliban officials visited the United States in 1997 they made a special stop in Omaha to pay homage to Gouttierre. In 1999, another Taliban delegation, which included military commanders with ties to bin Laden and Al Qaeda, was escorted by Gouttierre on a tour of Mount Rushmore.
Teaching children to count with pictures of guns and dead bodies. That reminds me of something cited by Americans who were eager to condemn the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Apparently, if the propaganda was to be believed, Nicaraguan schoolbooks taught children to count with pictures of rifles and grenades needed to battle the Yanquis. That was bad, very bad, and one more reason to support the Contras, war and intervention.
6:09 am on July 3, 2006
