About Afghan and Pakistani textbooks

It is true that the University of Nebraska, Omaha, was the conduit of US funds to the Education Center for Afghanistan in Peshawar, Pakistan, between September 1986 and June 1994. It is true that the Afghan mujahideen authored textbooks, in Dari and Pashto, for primary school glorifying violence and the University did not object. It is true that even though these books were redacted to remove all violent material in 1992, they continued to be available in Afghanistan.

However, if this following is the source of this information,

"A" Is for Allah, "J" Is for Jihad Author(s): Craig Davis Source: World Policy Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 90-94

, available on scribd and elsewhere: http://www.scribd.com/doc/54934790/A-is-for-Allah-J-is-for-Jihad,
then when Pervez Hoodbhoy writes, e.g.,

CIA funds went to buy advertisements inviting hardened and ideologically dedicated men to fight in Afghanistan, and a $50 million U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) grant, administered by the University of Nebraska, Omaha, paid for textbooks that exhorted Afghan children "to pluck out the eyes of their enemies and cut off their legs." These were approved by the Taliban for use in madrassas (Islamic schools) and are still widely available in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

it is wrong in that:

1. The textbook that exhorted Afghan children to pluck out the eyes of their enemies and cut off their legs, dates from 1970, during the reign of King Zahir Shah.
2. The textbooks with the other violent stuff were available in Kabul in May 2000, apparently pirated from the original US-sponsored texts, printed in Peshawar.
3. It is not clear that the textbooks were available in anything but Dari and Pashto. (Urdu would be the main medium of instruction in Pakistan.) Therefore "widely available in Pakistan" is both not in Craig Davis' text, nor is it terribly significant, even if true.

Excerpts:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Education Center for Afghanistan, located in Shakir Peshawar, Pakistan,and operated by the Afghan mujahidin (holy warriors), published a series of primary education textbooks replete with images of Islamic militancy.

...
Alif is for Allah, Allah is one.
...
Ti is for Rifle (tufang), Javed obtains rifles for the Mujahidin...
...
As in this passage, the promotion of violence for the sake of Islam is the predominate them throughout the mujahideen textbook series in both mathematics and language arts for grades on through six.

Although these violent images were officially edited out of the schoolbooks in 1992, my fieldwork in Afghanistan and among the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan in 1999 and 2000 revealed that the unedited versions of these textbooks were still in use in both countries. {and in Peshawar's second hand bookshops}.
....
When I visited Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, in May 2000, I discovered that the stores stocking Taliban-approved textbooks were selling freshly printed copies of the old, unrevised mujahidin texts.....
...
However, such messages and images of violence aimed at children are by no means a recent phenomenon. Consider this poem from a first-grade language arts textbook, published in 1970:
....
If, with designs on our land,
Our dirty enemies
Come forward one step,
We will cut off their feet,
We will cut off their legs....
.....
We will pluck out his eyes.....
....

A joke in a fifth-grade language-arts schoolbook from the same period displays a macabre sense of humor. A boy returning from war was asked "What did you do in the war?" He answered, "I cut both legs off an enemy at the knees." When asked why he did not cut off the enemy's head, the boy answered, "Someone else had already cut it off".

...The hostile imagery was a part of the official curriculum during the reign (1933-73) of King Zahir Shah....

{Under the Communist regime} In "Martyrs", a poem printed in a fourth-grade textbook, the students learned that they were the "martyrs of Western oppression". Martyrdom and sacrifce were stressed as necessary components of the communist revolution and resistance against the enemy: "agents of the British", "agents of colonialism", and "agents of Western oppression". These were all euphemisms for the mujahidin....This series was still in limited use in May 2000 in some Afghan schools....including in the Estiqlal Lycee, a small coeducational Afghan elementary school in Islamabad, Pakistan.
....
....

Far more violent, religiously oriented, and potentially damaging to Afghan children was the next generation of textbooks, developed in Peshawar in the late 1980s by a committee of Afghan educators under the auspices of the seven-party alliance of mujahidin..... {These textbooks contained e.g, mujahiden attacked 50 Russian soldiers,killing 20. How many Russians fled? and
The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second, if a Russian is at a distance of 3200 meters...., etc.}

Another irony is that this textbook series was underwritten by US grants. One of the responsibilities of the mujahidin-operated Education Center for Afghanistan was to write, print and distribute textbooks. The ECA was funded by the Education Program for Afghanistan at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), under a $50 million grant from the US Agency for International Development that ran from September 1986 through June 1994. The Univ.NO program staff chose to ignore the images of Islamic militancy in the children's textbooks during the first five years of the program.

Raheem Yaseer, an Afghan educator who worked at the Univ.NO office in Peshawar during the early years of the program and now acts as campus coordinator for the program in Omaha, defends the decision to allow the mujahidin parties to develop the violent contents of the textbooks free from outside intervention. The staff, he says, was acutely aware of Afghan "religious and cultural sensitivities" during the war with the Soviets. Moreover, the University of Nebraska did not wish to be seen as imposing American values on Afghan educators.

After the Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the Education Program for Afghanistan- under increasing pressure from Afghan parents and teachers, and various aid organizations- decided in 1991 to remove the militant images from the mujahidin textbook series. The revision process was completed by 1992. Educators commonly refer to the edited versions as the revised UNO textbooks, which are widely used in Pakistan and Afghanistan today.

However, two years ago, Joyce Gachiri, a project officer on education for the Afghanistan Country Office of UNICEF located in Islamabad, reported seeing many unrevised mujahidin books in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as well as in the province of Badakhshan, which was then in the hands of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. During my visit to Kabul in May 2000, I purchased an entire series of the unrevised textbooks.

According to Ahmad Shah Durani, the printing press manager at the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR) in Peshawar - the organization responsible for printing the revised UNO textbooks- the unedited mujahidin textbooks were not printed by ACBAR after 1992. When I confronted him in June 2000 with new copies of the violence-filled unrevised textbooks I had purchased in Kabul, he said that the inferior quality of paper and ink used pointed to an independent printing press in Peshawar.

The appearance of these unedited textbooks freshly printed in Peshawar and sold at textbook shops in Kabul some eight years after they were to have been replaced suggests that the Taliban wished to inspire a new generation of militants with the message of jihad. But the Taliban, who came to power in 1996, may not be entirely to blame. Between 1992 and 1996, militant factions of mujahidin ruled and battled over Kabul. Thus it is likely that these textbooks never fell out of favor with the mujahidin leadership, who were responsible for the militant content in the first place......