School Is in for the Taliban’s New Model Army

School in Afghanistan is mostly Kalashnikovs, suicide bombings, and the Quran. That’s the Taliban recipe for education. While Afghanistan’s ban of women and girls from public life, and especially the classroom, is a big part of the Taliban’s evisceration of freedom since they retook power almost two years ago, an even bigger problem than the girls who can’t go to school is the boys who do.

Many people who have fled Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return in August 2021 shudder at the memory of their own education under the extremists’ last regime, between 1996 and 2001. They were taught to shun women and girls, even their own kin, learned math by counting bullets, and studied science without pictures. Human rights, democracy, and peace were heavily redacted.

The Taliban 2.0 have doubled down, with schools across the country converted into madrassas, religious institutions for rote learning of the Quran (in Arabic, naturally, not Pashto), as the United Nations reported. It’s not scholars but bombers that they are churning out. Outside of Florida, it’s hard to imagine a more arid educational landscape: They will emerge without skills, with no way to compete in a modern, digitized, integrated economy. They will be barely literate or numerate, ignorant of the basics needed to become civilized and socialized adults. In the short term, they will simply be laughingstocks. Longer term, they’ll be the donkeys of jihad.

“You can make or break a society through the education system, and the Taliban know it. There is a realpolitik perspective here, and there should be concern that this is a key component of a terrorist state,” said Lauryn Oates, an education specialist familiar with the system in Afghanistan.

The Taliban, whose name, ironically enough, means “students,” have been at war with education for years. The Taliban declared their intention to strip learning out of education in a December 2020 report by their “review committee on the modern school curriculum” as they prepared a return to power paved by former U.S. President Donald Trump’s surrender earlier that year.

The problem, apparently, is that Afghan education was too woke. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) said the Taliban found the republic curriculum veered from “Islamic values,” promoted “non-Islamic” topics such as music and democracy, and reflected foreign influences. “The Taliban seek to redefine concepts such as ‘freedom,’ ‘human rights,’ ‘peace,’ and ‘equality’ within its interpretation of Islamic tradition, and to teach that the framework of Sharia is the only path to attaining these values,” SIGAR said.

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They haven’t yet managed to print new textbooks, Oates said, since they have little time and less money. But, unlike in economics, it does all trickle down. Taliban ideology is now part of the “cultural atmosphere as teachers are compelled to teach Taliban-approved curriculum,” she told Foreign Policy.

That updated curriculum, as of last December, according to the newspaper Hasht-e-Subh, includes a mandate for “removing the images of all living beings, propagating jihad, justifying violence, bloodshed and destruction, prohibiting any advocacy for democracy and human rights, opposition to women’s education and freedom, propagating the Taliban’s narrative of history, focusing on the Islamic world and ignoring the non-Islamic world, especially the West.” There’s more, of course, to revise and demonize: the United Nations, Shiites, Buddhists, and even landmines—the Taliban did sow their share of IEDs over the last 20 years.

“There is no more efficient way to indoctrinate a society than through the education system. The infrastructure already exists, so you use that to spread your message,” Oates said.

They have fertile fields. Afghanistan’s low literacy rate—less than 40 percent—means the ability of students to counteract or contextualize the ideology is limited. “People in Belgium, Britain, Canada become radicalized despite living in environments that present all the tools to mitigate against radicalization. But in states like Afghanistan, it is so much easier, as these critical faculties don’t exist,” Oates said.

Most of the students aren’t eager pupils. Reports underscore that boys are kidnapped or purchased from indigent families to feed the madrassa hunger. H.R. McMaster, the former U.S. Army general who served briefly as one of Trump’s national security advisors, described a network of madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan as “factories that perpetuate ignorance and foment hatred to produce terrorists.” Up to a million boys at any one time learn little Kierkegaard, but they do learn their way around a Kalashnikov, as well as grenades, rocket launchers, and machine guns. Also, suicide vests.

The problem is that what happens in Afghanistan, as history has shown, doesn’t stay in Afghanistan. In Alexander’s day, or the first or second British try, it was a local affair. No longer. Not when they’ve been on board with al Qaeda for 20-odd years and counting and adding terrorist offshoots like a mushroom collector let loose.

Indoctrination, said Abdullah Khenjani, a former deputy minister for peace during the Afghan republic, is going to bring blowback. It will further radicalize the radicals, for starters. But not just that.

“Afghanistan could become a breeding ground, fostering and exporting radicalism and radicals to neighboring regions and even further afield,” he said.