Afghan children are being taught with U.S.-funded textbooks explicitly written to exclude four decades of war in an almost self-satirizing attempt to “bring people together.”
“There is no mention of the Soviet war, the mujaheddin, the Taliban or the U.S. military presence,” reports the Washington Post. “In their efforts to promote a single national identity, Afghan leaders have deemed their own history too controversial.”
When state-funded indoctrination books whitewash entire swathes of relevant history, societal problems don’t simply go away. They’re compounded. Afghans are suffering on a daily basis from war and yet the U.S. and their Afghan “education” wardens appear to have decided to keep children ignorant of the causes of their country’s troubles.
Attempting to erase four decades of history is something extremely beneficial for the criminals, thugs, and extremists that have terrorized the country in that time. U.S. officials and the Afghan Ministry presumably want to prevent Afghans from knowing that the Soviets invaded and slaughtered perhaps over a million Afghans, or that the U.S. helped spur extremist jihadis to power, or that the Taliban forced a delusional brand of religious savagery on the people, or that the U.S. has committed extensive atrocities and war crimes throughout ten years of military occupation. Lucky for the Russians, Americans, and Taliban.
“Our recent history tears us apart. We’ve created a curriculum based on the older history that brings us together, with figures universally recognized as being great,” said Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s education minister. “These are the first books in decades that are depoliticized and de-ethnicized.”
Depoliticized, de-enthicized, and de-factized. The curriculum, which was “reviewed” for “inappropriate material” by people the Post calls “U.S. military cultural advisers,” is anathema to education. It does the opposite of what education is supposed to do, instead keeping Afghans ignorant and doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, never having learned from them in the first place.
