Each Tomahawk missile that the United States fires in Afghanistan costs at least $500,000. That's enough for local aid groups to build more than 20 schools, and in the long run those schools probably do more to destroy the Taliban.
That is from Nicholas Kristof's column, It Takes a School, Not Missiles. My title? Well, consider the first sentence of that column:
Since 9/11, Westerners have tried two approaches to fight terrorism in Pakistan, President Bush's and Greg Mortenson's.
And perhaps this draws my attention because I am both a Quaker who views the use of military force not as the first thing to be taken from our toolbox of international relations, and I am a school teacher who has learned the helping lift up others is far more effective in changing behavior than is strict discipline. I encourage you to read what Kristof offers, and I invite you to consider my reflections thereupon.
In case you haven't yet read the Kristof, allow me to summarize the key points. Mortenson tried and failed in 1993 to climb one of the world's highest peaks, K2. He
stumbled weakly into a poor Muslim village. The peasants nursed him back to health, and he promised to repay them by building the village a school.Scrounging the money was a nightmare - his 580 fund-raising letters to prominent people generated one check, from Tom Brokaw - and Mr. Mortenson ended up selling his beloved climbing equipment and car. But when the school was built, he kept going. Now his aid group, the Central Asia Institute, has 74 schools in operation. His focus is educating girls.
Mortenson wrote (with David Relin) about his experiences in a book entitled Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time (on the cover of which you will see three young girls in head scarves reading). The local community that wants a school provides a buy-in by providing the land. So far the Taliban has left his schools alone, and when one anti-American mob was attacking aid groups, something interesting happened:
"This is our school," the mob leaders decided, and they left it intact.
Mortenson has experienced thorns among the roses, including being kidnapped for 8 days. Still, he argues that the Taliban recruit those who are poor and illiterate, and educated woman are more likely to
restrain their sons. Five of his teachers are former Taliban, and he says it was their mothers who persuaded them to leave the Taliban; that is one reason he is passionate about educating girls.So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan's tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports. There would be no immediate payback, but a better-educated and more economically vibrant Pakistan would probably be more resistant to extremism.
no immediate payback Here I wish to reflect for a moment. As professional educator, a teacher if you will, I know that my work ultimately needs to be aimed at the longterm wellbeing of those students who pass through my care, and it is thus that I have the greatest impact upon the future of the society and world in which I live and work. I cannot avoid shorter term concerns such as the unavoidable external assessments by which (unfortunately) we seem to insist on evaluating our students, our teachers and our schools. But in a sense, the process of education is like the Jewish tale of a man who is caring for an olive tree: when told that he will never live to enjoy the fruit from that tree responds that his children's children will. And I am reminded that there is a prohibition in Jewish law from destroying fruit trees during a siege. I believe it is and should be the same with schools. We should invest ourselves in education for a future we may not see, and we should strive mightily against the razing, physically or morally, of the institutions which empower our young people and eventually provide the benefits of which perhaps we cannot yet fully conceive.
I remember reading once a military figure who argued that when our Army has to go to war, it is an admission that it has failed in its primary purpose, which should be to deter war. And even the preparation for war can in a sense be something of an admission of failure. I am reminded of the words Dwight Eisenhower spoke to the Amercian Society of Newspaper Editors in April of 1953, only months into his presidency, in which I will bold some key words:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?
That is why it is perhaps not surprising to see that people in the Pentagon are able to value what Mortenson has been doing. It has ordered numerous copies of his book, and invited him to speak, and we read in Kristof
"I am convinced that the long-term solution to terrorism in general, and Afghanistan specifically, is education," Lt. Col. Christopher Kolenda, who works on the Afghan front lines, said in an e-mail in which he raved about Mr. Mortenson's work. "The conflict here will not be won with bombs but with books. ... The thirst for education here is palpable."
The thirst for education here is palpable. How true that is around the world, not just in Afghanistan. I teach in a school which regular experiences parents lying and cheating in an attempt to have their children attend because our school is perceived as offering so much more than the schools their children are supposed to attend. It is nigh universal that parents seek to enable their children to have the opportunity for a better life than they have had, and education is usually seen as key to that goal.
Kristof notes that education and economic opportunity are the "best tonic" against the fundamentalism of groups like the Taliban, even as he is realistic enough to recognize that in the short term we will still need military force to provide the conditions in which education and economic opportunity might flourish. And I cannot help but think that were we spending a small fraction of that expended so unnecessarily in how we have intervened in Iraq, for example, how much we could have done to rebuild our school buildings, especially in poor urban and rural communities. We could have provided them with science labs, computers, and - yes these are still necessary - books for their libraries. We could have set up and funded adult education centers for the many in our nation, especially but not exclusively New Americans, whose previous lives did not enable them to learn those skills and information that would more empower their lives, including being able to help their children learn.
Kristof is correct of the importance of education as a tool in our relations with other nations, in our ability to help PEACEFULLY change societies around the world. I am reminded that many, including my niece, who served in the Peace Corps did so as teachers, whether formally in schools or informally in instructing in agricultural techniques, or in helping construct irrigation facilities and the like. And the emphasis that Mortenson places on the education of females reminds me of the focus Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammed Yunus had in lending to women through his Grameen bank, the empowering effect of microcredit to women, the building of community, of economic stability.
I think I have added another book to the long list of those I must read. And I want to end with the final words in Kristof's column, words which those whose first thought is always the application of force will not find comfortable, but words which I believe are true, in part because of the impact I have also seen from the work of Yunus. Please reflect upon their implication.
So a lone Montanan staying at the cheapest guest houses has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration.
Peace.
UPDATE In a comment at Daily Kos, A Siegel suggests that instead of Amazon one consider going through Three Cups of Tea homepage. He also provides a link to Central Asia Institute which "is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with the mission to promote and support community-based education, especially for girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan." Hence this addition. Peace.