The War Within the War in Afghanistan
As President Obama prepares to announce his new strategy for Afghanistan in his address to the world tonight from West Point, it’s worth shedding light on a source of instability that will not be remedied by simply putting more boots on the ground. According to UNICEF, just 28% of Afghan adults are literate, ranking Afghanistan among the most illiterate countries in the world. It is not difficult to draw a correlation between a dearth of basic education and an inclination toward religious extremism. But illiteracy also breeds instability by fundamentally obstructing the flow of information, producing an environment susceptible to a “war of communication”.
This is the quandary the U.S. finds itself in with the Taliban. Every day, the Taliban floods Afghanistan with anti-American propaganda, making messaging with the Afghan people an unmanageable task because we are constantly competing with misinformation. Thomas Friedman calls this collection of propaganda “The Narrative”, writing in a recent op-ed:
“The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand ‘American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy’ to keep Muslims down.”
Afghanistan’s culture of ignorance is a major reason why “The Narrative” has been able to take such strong hold of a substantial portion of its population. Gen. McChrystal has stressed that victory will require “aggressive actions to win the important battle of perception.” But is altering the perception of an illiterate public even feasible?
How do we ensure that the Afghan public receives truly unbiased information? More importantly, how can the average Afghan person differentiate between credible and incredible information? Success in Afghanistan would require the launch of a massive public relations campaign, but such a strategy seems futile given the current state of Afghan society. Success will hinge on a transformation of Afghanistan’s society at a very fundamental level, and that transformation begins with education.
The number of schools in Afghanistan has grown steadily since the U.S. invasion to about 10,000, despite the Taliban’s ongoing trek across the country burning schools to the ground. Nicholas Kristof writes that “for the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there.” The Washington Post reports that Obama will send an additional 34,000 soldiers, pushing the total U.S. troop level just past 100,000. Yet the 2010 budget request for U.S. assistance to Afghanistan includes just $95 million for education.
In the months leading up to this evening’s announcement, the bulk of the nation’s focus has been on the number of troops Obama plans to deploy. But it will take much more than a troop surge to “fix” Afghanistan. It will take massive investments toward better governance, a healthy economy, adequate security, and perhaps most importantly, a stable and effective education system. The U.S. needs a comprehensive – and costly – social-political-military strategy to be successful in Afghanistan. Lee Hamilton concluded a recent commentary by posing the question: “Is this type of war really the best use of American power and resources in today’s world?” Is this type of war worth it in a religiously and ethnically divided, illiterate, impoverished, geopolitical black hole rife with corruption? Hopefully Obama has taken all of these factors into account because merely injecting more troops into Afghanistan will do very little to win McChrystal’s underlying “battle of perception”. If we are to win the hackneyed yet all-important “hearts and minds” we had better shift more attention to education, or risk letting a false perception become reality in the eyes of the Afghan people.
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