There are countries that suffer wars, and there are countries that suffer wars and the slow, deliberate murder of their own future. Afghanistan is the second kind. For forty-seven years — since the Soviet invasion of 1979 tore the country from its own trajectory — Afghanistan has not merely bled for itself. It has bled for the whole world. It has been the launching pad, the training ground, and the graveyard for ideologies that outlived their patrons and returned, again and again, to haunt Kabul, Kandahar, New York, London, Paris, and Moscow alike. Every decade has produced a fresh chapter of the same tragedy, and every chapter has ended the same way: with Afghan children, especially Afghan girls, paying the final price.

It did not have to be this way. And that is the cruelest part of this story — not that Afghanistan was fated to suffer, but that it was offered, more than once, a door out of the darkness, and that door was slammed shut from within.

When the Soviet Union entered Central Asia in the twentieth century, it left behind a complicated and often brutal legacy — but one undeniable outcome was mass literacy. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan: nations that emerged from Soviet influence with literacy rates above 98 percent, women doctors, women engineers, women teachers standing shoulder to shoulder with men in classrooms and clinics. Whatever one thinks of the political system that produced it, education was not optional there. It was universal.

Afghanistan sat at the edge of that same civilizational current and refused to drink from it. And when the Soviets withdrew and the Americans arrived two decades later with schools, scholarships, and rebuilt universities, the same resistance returned in........

© The Friday Times