eric-andres-desk:

residentialblacksheep:

tilthat:

TIL in the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

via reddit.com

I was in class with a middle aged Afghan man who grew up in a Pakistani refugee camp, he told us how his textbooks taught him how to count using pictures of missiles

“The mujahideen operated an Educational Center for Afghanistan during the 1980s. Pervez Hoodbhoy gives the following examples from children’s textbooks designed for it by the University of Nebraska under a $50 million USAID grant that ran from September 1986 through June 1994. A third-grade mathematics textbook asks: “One group of maujahidin attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians are killed. How many Russians fled?” A fourth-grade textbook ups the ante: “The speed of a Kalashnikov [the ubiquitous Soviet-made semiautomatic machine gun] bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.” The program ended in 1994, but the books continued to circulate: “US-sponsored textbooks, which exhort Afghan children to pluck out the eyes of their enemies and cut off their legs, are still widely available in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some in their original form.”

The madrassahs were both private and government-funded, and ranged from those who thought of Islamic piety in religious terms to those for whom Islam was also a political calling. In spite of their proliferation, military training was mainly carried out in army camps. The trainees were divided into two groups: Afghan mujahideen and non-Afghan jihadi volunteers. Brigadier Muhammad Yusuf, a chief of the Afghan cell of ISI for four years, confirmed: “During my four years, some 80,000 mujahiddin were trained.” Ahmed Rashid estimates that thirty-five thousand Muslim radicals from forty-three Islamic countries fought for the mujahideen between 1982 and 1992. United States authorities estimated that “at least 10,000” received “some degree of military training.” A Los Angeles Times team of reporters that did a four-continent survey of the fallout of the Afghan jihad estimated that “no more than 5,000 had actually fought.” Between the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February 1989 and the collapse of Kabul’s Communist government in April 1992, another round of “at least 2,500 foreigners” received “military instruction of some sort.” That made for a total of 7,500, no mean figure: “Largely out of sight of the world, in training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, something akin to a radical Islamic foreign legion was taking shape.” Around this core was a larger group: tens of thousands more studied in the thousands of new madrassahs in Pakistan. Eventually, Rashid concludes, “more than a hundred thousand Muslim radicals around the world had direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan.” However most madrassah graduates were not destined for Afghanistan but for the internal political contest in Pakistan. Tariq Ali gives an estimate of 2,500 madrassahs with an annual crop of 225,000 students, many of whom had been taught literacy in primers that stated that the Urdu letter tay stood for tope (cannon), kaaf for Kalashnikov, khay for khoon (blood), and jeem for jihad.“

Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim