Class is out at Sarkh Doz, a sleepy village near the sweeping Helmand river. A ghostly silence fills the school playground, the gate is bolted shut and the proud yellow classrooms have been reduced to a blackened shell of cinders.
Taliban arsonists set the blaze, locals say. One night a car full of militants roared up, doused the building in petrol and struck a match. Then they continued to the next village, Mangalzai, and torched that school too.
Now both buildings — recently built with American funding — are deserted, the teachers have fled and another body blow has been dealt to aid efforts in Helmand, the southern province where 3 300 British troops are deploying. ”Terrible,” said police chief Ahmed Samonwal, shaking his head as he walked past the blackened schools. ”This is the work of our enemies.”
Playground has become battleground in the Afghan south, where the resurgent Taliban have launched a fierce campaign of arson, intimidation and assassination that has closed 200 schools in recent months and left 100 000 students at home.
Teachers are in the front line. In December assassins dragged a man who defied warnings to stop teaching girls from his classroom in Nad Ali, another Helmand district, and shot him at the school gate. Four other teachers have been killed and hundreds more threatened with ”night letters” — handwritten notices delivered in the dark, ordering them to stop teaching or die.
The terror campaign underscores the challenge facing British troops in securing a province ruled by terror as much as central government. ”Our teachers are helpless because security is so weak,” said the provincial education head Hayat Allah Rafiqi. ”By day the government rules but by night it is in the hands of the Taliban.”
Sixty-six of Helmand’s 224 schools have closed, he said, and others have scaled back classes as parents move their children to the safety of the main towns. Even there, protection is uncertain. Two days after the Nad Ali murder, gunmen burst into Karte Laghan secondary school in the provincial capital, Laskhar Gah, killing a watchman and a student. The attack occurred less than a mile from the new British base.
”We are always afraid of being shot or attacked on our way home,” said Gul Ali, a female teacher of chemistry and biology at the school.
While some of the province’s 1 500 teachers have buckled under the pressure, most are defying the threats. For some it is a matter of patriotism; for others the security of a $49 monthly salary. ”Of course we are afraid,” said Abdul Hakim, who teaches 12-year-old boys. ”But this is our duty. For the sake of the next generation, our country and our children, we cannot quit our jobs.”
Hakim, a man with piercing grey eyes under a dark turban, works in Garmser, a 90-minute drive south of Laskhar Gah. An atmosphere of raw fear pervades the town.
The town police station is peppered with bullet holes since a Taliban attack in December that left nine dead. The girls’ school is shut, said Hakim, and one of his colleagues who had received a night letter had fled to Laskhar Gah.
No official wanted to speak to The Guardian — apparently the first non-military foreign visit for years — outside the safety of the heavily guarded governor’s compound. ”There are Taliban spies in the bazaar,” said one. ”If they associate us with you, we could be targeted.”
Police officer Hakim Khan produced a night letter he found nailed to his front door with a bullet hanging by a thread. ”By the name of Allah, this is the victorious voice of the Taliban,” it read. ”It is written here that Abdul Hakim Khan must quit his job in the next week. Otherwise we will not be responsible for what will happen.”
The Taliban’s anti-education offensive chimes with their hatred of girls’ education, which their one-eyed leader Mullah Omar banned while in power in the 1990s. But the campaign also serves a broader purpose — to erode the tenuous authority of President Hamid Karzai’s government in advance of the British-led Nato deployment.
”This is not just about girls. The Taliban are against all education,” said Sardar Muhammad of Mercy Corps, one of just five relief agencies operating in Helmand. ”Ignorant people are easier to control. When they were fighting their way to power [in the mid 1990s] only the uneducated were sent to the front.”
The war on education is part of a broader tactical shift. Wary of armed confrontations with American troops, which they often lose, the Taliban have turned their sights on Afghan employees of the despised Kabul government. Aid workers, policemen and government officials have also been targeted.
In Helmand province the insurgents are further strengthened by a recent alliance with the province’s powerful drug barons. The two groups have a shared interest in chaos along the southern border, allowing heroin to flow in one direction and freshly trained insurgents in the other.
The newly appointed governor of Garmser, Haji Abdullah Jan, said he narrowly avoided being killed by a roadside bomb two days earlier. ”Some villagers called me with a warning. Otherwise I would have driven into it,” he said outside his office, holding aloft an anti-tank mine rigged to a detonating device.
Securing the schools will soon be a task for British paratroops, with about 2 500 expected to start arriving in May, backed by Apache attack helicopters. But the British commander in Laskhar Gah, Lientenant Colonel Henry Worsley, said their principal role was to train and support the fledgling Afghan security forces.
”In a place like Garmser we might help mount a checkpost, put a soldierly look on it, and tell them how to defend it,” he said.
In the meantime a generation of students is being lost, and impatience at the Kabul government’s impotence is growing. Haji Karim Khan (65) considered his family’s educational history.
Four decades ago he graduated from Kabul University, he said. During the bloody Russian occupation just one of his sons completed secondary school. Now his six grandsons may not even make it that far — they have just been moved to the town of Goreshk since all four local schools closed down.
The people of Helmand felt the Karzai government has abandoned them, he said angrily. ”You just hear a small item at the end of the news saying the situation in the south-west is bad these days. But that is not enough. They need to tell us what they are going to do.”
Backstory
Afghanistan’s education system has made significant strides since the fall of the Taliban, which banned girls’ schooling in 2001, but still has far to go. Half of all eligible-age children now attend school — the highest rate ever, with one-third girls. There are 7,000 schools and the US has distributed 37,5-million free textbooks. But the enrolment figures mask glaring imbalances. Most students drop out and only a tiny minority makes it to second level. In the conservative southern and eastern provinces only 15% of girls go to school due to poor security, lack of facilities and early marriage. – Guardian Unlimited Â