Intellectual Battlefield
If Obama is serious about changing anti-American sentiments that plague the Arab world, he has to invest in the intellectual infrastructure, starting with an illiteracy rate in Afghanistan that is among the lowest in the world. Decades of war have left the Afghan children rootless and disenfranchised. Their ideological bearings come from maddrasses where extremism, cloaked under benevolent Islamic evangelism, is being injected into their young minds. Schools are where the struggle of ideas occurs and where we could have worked toward eradicating anti-American sentiments. For the past fifteen years, Greg Mortesson, best known for his bestseller Three Cups of Tree, has worked to promote peace in Afghanistan, one book, one desk, one good school, at a time. In a country where the literacy of the female Afghans languishes in the single digits, he has built more than 130 schools, mostly for girls. The question is: whether his efforts, and those of thousands of other humanitarian organizations, like Doctors without Borders who risk their lives to treat the sick and the wounded in Afghanistan, will be undermined by our hasty departure. The least we can do, have to do, is create a milieu for political reform processes, enabling legitimate civil society actors, Afghan or foreign, to promote basic humanitarian needs.
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