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AFGHANISTAN - TALIBAN MAY END OPPOSITION TO

EDUCATION FOR GIRLS - MANY UNCERTAINTIES

Under the Taliban regime women were not allowed

to be educated and were forced to wear the burka.

The Taliban are ready to drop their ban on schooling girls in Afghanistan, the country's education minister has said.

Farooq Wardak told the UK's Times Educational Supplement a "cultural change" meant the Taliban were "no more opposing girls' education".

The Taliban - who are fighting the Kabul government - have made no public comment on the issue.

Afghan women were not allowed to work or get an education under the Taliban regime overthrown in 2001.

Making deals

Mr Wardak made his comments during the Education World Forum in London.

He told the TES: "What I am hearing at the very upper policy level of the Taliban is that they are no more opposing education and also girls' education.

"I hope, Inshallah (God willing), soon there will be a peaceful negotiation, a meaningful negotiation with our own opposition and that will not compromise at all the basic human rights and basic principles which have been guiding us to provide quality and balanced education to our people," the minister added.

Last October, Afghan President Hamid Karzai confirmed unofficial talks with Taliban leaders were under way in an attempt to end the bloody insurgency that has wrecked the troubled country for more close to a decade.

Mr Wardak's words suggest the negotiations have gone beyond issues like the release of prisoners to touch on areas of government policy, correspondents say.

However, the education minister admitted historical opposition to schooling extended beyond the Taliban to the "deepest pockets" of Afghan society.

"That is the reason that in many provinces of Afghanistan we do not have either male or female teacher," he said.

"During the Taliban era the percentage of girls of the one million students that we had was 0%. The percentage of female teachers was 0%. Today 38% of our students and 30% of our teachers are female."

Female MPs greeted with disbelief the Taliban's supposed softening of stance on schooling for girls.

Roshanak Wardak, a member of parliament from the central-eastern Afghan province of Wardak, told the BBC: "The Afghan government is saying that, but it's not true.

"I don't believe in this because in Wardak we have six Pashtun-dominated districts and all the girls' schools are closed and have never been open. There are only schools open in two Hazara-dominated districts."

Marman Gulhar, MP for the north-eastern province of Kunar, was also sceptical.

"This is not true and it will never happen," she told the BBC. "The Taliban will never be ready for that [girls' education].

"In fact they are fighting against that. The girls' schools are closed and still are closed."

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Analysis - Dawood Azami BBC World Service Editor, Kabul

The apparent relaxation of the Taliban's policy towards education doesn't seem to be part of a formal deal with the Afghan government.

Hundreds of schools, for boys and girls, have been attacked and destroyed since the Taliban regime was toppled in 2001.

But in recent years public pressure has partially forced the Taliban, at least at local level, to change their minds about education.

The Taliban did not publicly oppose female education when they were in power in the 1990s.

Their position was they did not have the resources to establish separate female educational institutions with all female staff.

The Taliban now say they don't oppose education, but are against any use of the educational sector as a political and ideological tool against them.

The Taliban appears to have reconsidered many of their views since they were ousted, including acceptance of video technologies they once considered un-Islamic.

The Taliban also once banned opium poppy cultivation, but now farmers grow it in areas under the militants' control.

Across the country agreements have been struck at a local level between militants and village elders to allow girls and female teachers to return to schools, the BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul reports.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/21/taliban-afghan-government-girls-education

AFGHANISTAN - WHO BENEFITS FROM TALIBAN REVISIONISM?

The Afghan government is trying to whitewash the Taliban's image by claiming it no longer opposes education for girls

Farooq Wardak, the Afghan education minister and a key ally of President Hamid Karzai, claims that the Taliban leadership no longer opposes education for girls. The question is not whether this claim is true – teachers and students who continue to be terrorised by Taliban attacks would find it laughable – but why a senior Afghan official would engage in such misinformation.

The education ministry's own statistics show that 20 schools were bombed or burned down between March and October 2010. At least 126 students and teachers were killed in the same period – an increase from the previous year. It's hard to know how many of these attacks were carried out by the Taliban, but the evidence in many cases points in their direction.

Attacks are often preceded by a threatening "night letter" like this one, sent last year to a school in Kunduz, in the north:

"You were already informed by us to close the school and not mislead the pure and innocent girls under this non-Muslim government … This is the last warning to close the school immediately ... If you remain in the province, remember that you along with your family will be eliminated. Just wait for your death."

In another case, a female teacher received a letter that said:

"We Taliban warn you to stop working, otherwise we will take your life away. We will kill you in such a harsh way that no woman has so far been killed in that manner. This will be a good lesson for those women like you who are working."

Another teacher quit after receiving a letter with a Taliban insignia in October 2009:

"We warn you to leave your job as a teacher as soon as possible, otherwise we will cut the heads off your children and we shall set fire to your daughter."

When I showed some of these letters to Wardak last July, he passed his eyes over them briefly, then cast them aside, saying: "If we had time I could explain to you how I know that this is the handwriting of Pakistanis, not Afghans." He went on to question whether Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, really exists. This was a startling lesson in revisionism about the Taliban.

Today, just as when the Taliban were in power pre-9/11, some rural communities are able to negotiate with them to stop attacks on education. Afghan parents want their children educated, including their daughters, and fight for it, even when it puts them at risk. But the Taliban usually draws the line at educating girls over about age 10, when puberty and demands to segregate the sexes take precedence. And not all attacks are about gender. Many schools and teachers are attacked as visible agents of the government in small rural communities or as symbols of western influence and teaching.

When in power the Taliban claimed that girls were being denied education only because of scant resources, a claim that Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan, recently repeated. However, when I interviewed Mullah Zaeef about attacks on education several years ago, he dismissed Human Rights Watch's findings of systematic attacks as a fabrication.

Wardak plays down Taliban attacks on women and girls because he has become a leading government proponent of the need for reconciliation with the Taliban. It suits his agenda to whitewash continuing Taliban crimes. And, like many Afghan politicians, he prefers the conspiracy claims – that the Taliban are an entirely Pakistani creation, rather than confronting the messy reality of a home-grown movement that is as much a product of Afghan reality as of Pakistan's intelligence agency.

There is a risk that some politicians in the UK, US and elsewhere, nervous about mounting casualties and dwindling public support for the war in Afghanistan, will seize on such claims. Governments seeking an exit strategy may also find it convenient to play down Taliban abuses against women and girls.

While most women in Afghanistan desperately want peace, they don't want a peace deal that is blind to the price they may pay. That requires realism about the nature of the insurgency. Although a comprehensive peace deal seems distant for now, small local deals are already taking place under the name of "reintegration" of Taliban fighters, with the promise of jobs and other enticements. But there is no vetting system to stop a commander who is notorious for attacking girls' education from becoming a local security chief, or even a district governor, with all the obvious risks to women and girls.

Instead of trying to soften the image of a group synonymous with the oppression of women and girls, the education minister should focus on increasing opportunities for their schooling, and on protecting girls' education from attack. Attacking schools is a war crime and should never be glossed over. Those who threaten, bomb and burn down schools should instead be held to account.