Taliban resort to book burning in their hatred of education

Times:

The gunmen who broke into Miyan Abdul Hakim school in Kandahar city knew what they were looking for.

After they had terrorised the caretaker for doing the work of foreigners, they collected floor mats and desks to light bonfires inside the classrooms. Then they gathered all the dog-eared exercise books and school textbooks that they could find and threw them into the flames.

After a year's respite the Taleban has returned to attacking schools and intimidating teachers across much of the south and east of the country. Schoolbooks, regarded as a threat to the Taleban's grip on the minds of young Afghans, are a particular target.

Since the beginning of the new school year on March 23 there have been 36 attacks. Empty buildings have been set on fire or had grenades thrown into them. Teachers have been kidnapped, and later released. In one grisly case a caretaker was mutilated by having his ears and nose cut off, a common punishment for those accused of collaborating with the Afghan Government.

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All of the 40 schools in Marouf, one insurgency-affected district of Kandahar province, are now shut. Teachers fear that the situation could get as bad as it did in 2006 when nearly 200 schools were attacked. They worry that a new generation of Afghans is growing up uneducated and vulnerable to extremism.

The Education Ministry is trying to persuade tribal elders to protect schools. When they extend their protection guerrillas usually leave schools alone, although threatening “night letters” purportedly signed by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taleban leader, have been pinned to school doors ordering teachers to leave.

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With surveillance resources we should be able to ambush the Taliban attacks. Since the ambiguity of place is no longer in their favor, we have only to be concerned with the time of the attacks. I suspect that we can develop a pattern for that also. Such surveillance might also reveal where the Taliban are hiding if they are followed by drones. There should be an opportunity here for our side to seize.