We have been writing about those “newly discovered” mineral riches in Afghanistan ad nauseam.
We have been asking—and hypothesizing about—how this find will affect Afghanistan, its people, the war…
We have been speculating as to whether these newly found riches will enrich the Afghan people, or central government officials, or provincial and tribal leaders, or the Taliban, or foreign countries, or…
To be sure, no one knows. However, Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post asks one of the many questions that need to be asked:
Can a country without mining infrastructure and populated by people who’ve never known prosperity or possessed the collective memory of self-direction (70 percent of Afghans are under age 30) put its resources to constructive use?
According to Parker, the answer—“the key”—lies in education, in “educating the rising generation of Afghans in the liberal arts as well as in the technologies needed to advance this new economic potential.” And Parker tells us about one real, concrete example of educating at least a fraction of “the rising generation of Afghans.” An example that seems to be truly working: the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), the nation’s only private, nonprofit university.
The school was launched with the help of a substantial grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development and built on 48 acres in Kabul. Instruction commenced in 2006, and the first class graduated last month. The school has 500 students, 20 percent of them women, and it hopes to expand to 800 students next year and to 2,000 in five years.
To read more about this commendable project that may help Afghanistan really benefit from its newly discovered riches, please click here.
You’ll probably agree with Kathleen Parker that, “There’s more to mine in Afghanistan than minerals. And there’s gold in these students.”
Image: Courtesy embassyofafghanistan.org
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.