We must fund learning and not killing in the Muslim world

The principle of a 4,500 student school in Afghanistan had not been paid her $40 monthly salary since it was promised by the US government five months earlier. She asked an American, Greg Mortenson, if he could make enquiries. He found that her promised measly paypacket had been redirected to the funding of the immanent invasion of Iraq.

Individual case histories can open one’s eyes to what is really behind our policy failures in the Muslim world.

Who was Greg Mortenson? In 1993, he had completed his descent off the second highest mountain in the world and took a wrong turn. He found himself in a village in frontier Pakistan. He was the first foreigner ever to arrive there. His ragged and exhausted self needed a place to recover. The hospitality was overwhelming.

One day he saw a group of village children conducting their own lessons without a teacher. Some were writing with sticks in the sand. One of the children asked him to build a school for the village. The initiative of these children would be unheard of in the West. Before he knew what he was saying, he had agreed.

Back in the US, Mortenson did whatever he could to put some funding together. He sold his car. On a clunky typewriter he wrote 580 letters of appeal - and received one cheque for $100 back. He hired venues to give talks - only to have less than half a dozen attend. Then he gave a talk to a class of schoolchildren. One child donated his tin of pennies (US cents). Mortenson knew that a penny in itself was worthless. He began a program to collect worthless pennies and raised over 62,000 of them in his first attempt.

Gradually he built his bank up to $12,000. This was enough to build a school with the volunteer labour of the villagers. The materials had to be found and transported significant distances - much of it on human backs. A suspension bridge even had to be built by the community to get the material to their school.

(Recently in this country a $534,000 six-cubicle toilet block for a school with 55 students was built. What does this single example tell us of the cultural differences between frontier Muslims and us?)

Three years after Mortenson made his promise, the school was completed. Since then Mortenson’s fund-raising has enabled him to organise the building of, or contributed to the building of, schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan which have given more than 58,000 girls and boys a primary schooling.

We hear of the odd extremist attack on a girls’ school - but we don’t hear of the popular desire for all the children of Pakistan and Afghanistan to gain a broad education. When Greg Mortenson got his first school built, the women of the village prayed to Allah to bless the air that this infidel stepped into. And yet we in the West believe that Islam is fundamentally opposed to the education of girls.

The Islamic extremists are recruiting young uneducated males for training in hate and then training them on how to kill the hated. The extremists are able to do this by filling an education vacuum. Why cannot the US draw the obvious conclusion that the best way to combat the extremists is by contributing to the financing of a balanced primary education for all Pakistani and Afghan children?

As one of Mortenson’s compatriots looked up at the screaming jet planes when Operation Enduring Freedom was driving the Taliban into the hills, she thought how well Mortenson’s project could use the $20 million just one of those planes cost.

If one man a can achieve so much by passing around his hat, then why cannot the nation which can afford a military expenditure which is 40 per cent of the world’s total?

The answer to that question lies in the question itself. Any government with a massively disproportionate military is going to have its thinking distorted by its potential capacity to strike anybody at any time. The US went into Afghanistan with guns, not to rescue the oppressed people from the brutal Islamic extremists, but as a reaction to the attack of 9-11. Something had to be done to someone. As the objective was not justified, it could not be clearly defined to either the American people or to her allies. Nine years later, it still isn’t.

Our prime ministers keep telling us that we must prevent Afghanistan from becoming a training ground for terrorists. So, they are claiming that illiterate and dirt-poor men living thousands of kilometers away are in a position to harm us. I fail to see this. And, what is so special about Afghanistan? The London bombers were “self-starters” (getting their “training” through networking rather than attending any training camp), the Bali bombers were trained in Malaysia and the perpetrators of 9-11 were trained in the US and Germany.

As in Vietnam, the Americans could not have created a bigger mess for themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan than if they had planned it that way. And there we are as always - standing by our great and powerful friend. We do attempt to gain trust and respect in the developing world through good works - but the core of our foreign policy is to cosy-up to the guy with the big guns.

Throughout history those religious which have become fanatical have become evil in the process. The Taliban are no different. As warriors for God, they have no perception of how evil they have become. A child crippled by a Taliban bomb becomes collateral damage in this righteous struggle for the glory of God.

But the “American way” has become a type of god. Pentagon and CIA staff labour under the delusion that it is the US as an institution which occupies the moral high ground. Children as collateral damage appears to be accommodated within that perception today as much as it did in the Vietnam War. Blind are the righteous on a mission.

Caught up in this battle-of-the-moral-high-grounds are the Iraqi women who are afraid to conceive because miscarriages, birth defects and leukemia have significantly increased since uranium dust was scattered about the land by American and British projectiles with hardened tips of depleted uranium. Unexploded bomblets from both American and British cluster bombs are lying about in the thousands. The occasional child losing a body part will be a reminder for years to come of what the West once thought of the natives in its phony bid to rescue them.

Hate is an easily tapped-into emotion no matter what one’s ethnicity. All that is required is to keep the others on their side of the fence so that they become distant enough to become mysterious and potentially dangerous. No culture is perfect and when one focuses on any cultural negativity, an exaggeration of that negativity inevitably follows. As one bumper sticker in the US says: “Nuke them all and let Allah sort them out.” So many hate Mortenson for what he is doing for Muslim children that he fears for his own children’s safety in the US.

“Let’s fry Muslim children’s faces” would not be a bumper sticker - but “Nuke them all and let Allah sort them out” is saying exactly the same thing. It reminds me of the old computer game Battleships in which the participants are completely detached from any reality.

We should have learned from the Vietnam War fiasco that the militarily-dominated US Administration acts as if playing computer games. But we haven’t.

Footnote

In 2009, Greg Mortenson was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was passed over for Barack Obama. That was on October 9, 2009. On November 30, 2009, Obama ordered 30,000 more soldiers into Afghanistan. A “humble” president accepted the prize 10 days later.