09 October 2009
This Week from Washington, October 9
Podcast on security strategies in Afghanistan, Greg Mortenson’s work
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Narrator:
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President Obama and his national security team are examining a range of strategies for achieving long-term security in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a recent televised interview that Obama and his advisers are trying to look at Afghanistan from the ground up to make sure that the president’s decisions ensure security and protect the interests of America and its allies.
Obama is holding a series of consultations with the U.S. National Security Council, congressional leadership, allied nations and civilian national security experts. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the president may take several weeks before reaching a final decision.
On October 6th, Obama indicated to 30 key leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives that he does not intend to greatly reduce U.S. forces in Afghanistan or shift the mission entirely to hunting terrorists and the leaders of al-Qaida. What remains undecided is a substantial troop buildup similar to one that was used effectively in Iraq.
In March, Obama described his objectives in Afghanistan by saying the U.S. aims to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan and prevent their return to either country in the future. He added that the United States has no interest in controlling Afghanistan or dictating its future. The United States is in Afghanistan to confront a common enemy that threatens the United States, its friends and allies, and the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In June, Obama named Army General Stanley McChrystal to command U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan and implement his strategy. The president asked McChrystal to provide an assessment of the current situation and forecast what is needed to accomplish his strategy. Obama is now considering that assessment.
McChrystal is a veteran of U.S. Army special operations forces and was selected by Obama to implement the military component of his new strategy. McChrystal has extensive knowledge and understanding of counterinsurgency operations and conflicts of the type facing U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Gates said the inability of the United States and its allies to put enough troops in Afghanistan has contributed to the Taliban gaining momentum in recent months. Gates said that, regardless of the president’s decision on immediate troop levels, the United States will remain in Afghanistan.
The Senate voted 93 to 7 on October 6th for a 2010 defense spending bill totaling $626 billion, which includes $128 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Greg Mortenson is a mountain climber and humanitarian who says his work building schools in remote villages across Pakistan and Afghanistan has taught him that Westerners can "drop bombs, build roads or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated, a society won’t change.”
Mortensen is the author of Three Cups of Tea, a bestselling book about education in the region. He has delivered his message of improving education, especially for girls, at the Pentagon, on college campuses and other venues.
Mortenson spends much of his time visiting with tribal elders across the rugged region of South Asia to create plans for more schools. His work has won the admiration of Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen recently flew by helicopter through the mountains north of Kabul to help open the Pushghar Village Girls School, which Mortenson helped community leaders to build. Mullen brought presents for the schoolchildren — 300 girls and 45 boys — from his wife, Deborah. Mullen said Mortenson’s accomplishments are extraordinary. He noted that Mortenson has chosen to focus mainly on schools for girls in a part of the world that doesn’t value their education, and yet the male leadership in those countries support him.
While the Taliban have destroyed hundreds of girls’ schools elsewhere, for the most part they have not attacked the secular schools that Mortenson’s nonprofit Central Asia Institute builds with strong support from village elders. Some former Taliban even teach in these schools.
Mortenson says those former Taliban got out because their mothers told them what they were doing is not a good thing. Now these young men are willing to risk their lives to advocate for girls’ education. Mortenson says there is nothing in the holy Quran that says girls can’t go to school. If you talk to a scholarly imam, they all will say the Quran actually is a mandate for education, he says.
Three Cups of Tea has sold more than 3 million copies. Mortenson and his co-author David Oliver Relin refer to Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen, who says that simply educating girls to the fifth grade can dramatically raise the incomes of poor villagers. Schooling, Mortenson believes, is “the single most important and effective investment we can make in any society.”
Mortenson is convinced that educating girls does far more than just raise literacy rates in these poor mountain villages. Once boys are educated, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, Mortenson explains. The girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve hygiene and health care, and fight infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls, he says.
Girls make up 70 percent of the roughly 40,000 students attending 92 schools that bear the Central Asia Institute’s imprint and other sites where classes are taught in tents or outdoors for displaced families.
Mortenson says that we hear a lot of bad news from Afghanistan, but on education, a lot of really good things are happening. In 2001, at the height of the Taliban, there were 800,000 children — mostly boys — enrolled in schools. Today, there are over 8.4 million children attending school in Afghanistan, including 2.5 million females. This is the greatest increase in school enrollment in any country in modern history.
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