Afghanistan had a high literacy rate before the Soviet invasion. In 1983, my brother, Larry, showed me a declassified CIA film on the Afghani conflict with the Soviet Union. The Afghani fighters were fearless and resourceful. I watched in total amazement as an Afghani machinist with a forge, a lathe, simple hand tools, a drill press, and a dial caliper, he replicated an AK-47 rifle. Sadly, this isn’t today’s reality in Afghanistan. After the Afghanis expelled the Soviets, the Islamic zealots took over the country.
This had a chilling effect on education across the board on both sexes. If you could read, you were told at the point of a gun the Quran’s words of wisdom waa all-encompassing. In Obama’s first term, our military with his approval gifted the Afghani military with an eight billion dollar fleet of cargo transport aircraft. In just a few years, the Afghani military sold the entire fleet for scrap metal. Aircraft are complex machines and the Afghanis were incapable of maintaining such machines. This mistake by our military was repeatedly made with the Afghanis. Our military would build a military facility for them, shortly thereafter it would fall into disrepair and would be stripped of anything valuable.
Training the line Afghani soldier was an impossible feat as well. Drug abuse is a real problem among the Afghani soldiers as well as illiteracy. Those two factors make the average Afghani soldier untrainable. Another thing our instructors couldn’t dissuade both the Afghani national police and the soldiers from was not to extort the local merchants. It was also found it was a common practice at checkpoints for both the police and the soldiers to charge a toll to cross a checkpoint meant for bomb and weapon detection. Back to training; if you can’t read, you can’t call in an artillery strike from a map’s coordinates, you can’t repair your equipment from instructions from a manual, and the entire chain of command has to be done verbally. Of course, the Afghani officers could read, but corruption was strong within their ranks.
Outside of the cities, women are treated as slaves. One thing I have observed in the Middle East is the under usage of the female intellect. The Islamic Middle East will never reach its’ full potential without the usage of women’s brain’s horsepower. Afghani society is akin to having a V-8 engine that is only firing on four cylinders in its’ underutilization of women for their intellect. In 2012, I watched a documentary on the people of Afghanistan. A woman had a sick child. She went to what I call an Islamic witch doctor. She had to wait in a long line to see this witch doctor. His prescription was to scribble a verse from the Quran. He instructed the woman to clutch to the paper in her right hand while she chanted, “Allah is great and most merciful.” This is what happens when religious zealots hold sway over the people. Zealots of any stripe are a threat to all people in every land. Too much damage has been done to Afghanistan to be undone, in my opinion. It’s too bad our leaders didn’t recognize this fact before they threw away so much of our national treasure in an attempt to nation-build in Afghanistan.
Written by Mark Pullen. Published by Chief Editor, Sammy Campbell.