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Whatsapp A government school in Bamyan. Of the estimated 6.2 million Afghan children who attend school, and one third of them are girls

Dr Nouria Salehi is a nuclear physicist who began training science teachers in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Molecular geneticist turned author Sally Morrison discusses the importance of Dr Salehi's work as Afghanistan looks towards an uncertain future.

One of the most treacherous things to happen under the Taliban was the destruction of the Afghan education system. Sixty per cent of secondary teachers had been women, but under the Taliban they became deskilled and lost their standing and confidence.

In 2002, Dr Salehi, a 70-year-old Afghan Australian working as a nuclear physicist, set up the Afghan Australian Development Organisation. The organisation's main aim is the training of secondary science teachers, and since the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the Afghan Ministry for Education, AADO has trained at least 1700 teachers in Kabul and five of Afghanistan’s provinces.

The results are great. In Kabul Province, where Dr Salehi found school children being taught on the ground amid the rubble of their flattened village, there is now a fully operational school attended by 850 students, 250 of them girls.

At a girls’ school in the city, the director says that AADO’s teaching methods are the best she has come across, because they were conducted over a period of time with support so that the teachers could absorb what they were learning while they were actively teaching. Science teaching methods have improved exponentially, to the point where the director's school has just produced the top mark in the Afghan public matriculation exam with a score of 99.7 per cent. Five of the girls have won prestigious scholarships to study in Turkish universities and seventy-two students out of one hundred and sixty-two qualified for entrance to Kabul University.

Lacking in Afghanistan are people in the middle with enough education to create a society and develop bargaining power. Dr Salehi is such a person. She is Afghan educated, and while she might be an Australian citizen, Kabul is the city whose blueprint is written on Dr Salehi's mind as home. To go around in Kabul with her is to meet people who have known her since they were children. She and her family are respected people there.

The fractured Afghan nation needs healing and holding together in the face of all that threatens it from outside and within, and Dr Salehi and AADO urgently need support from Australia to continue their very important work that is designed to both heal and hold.

The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989, after nine years of occupying a north-south loop that took in the major cities and everything in between, but did not spread far into the rural areas where the bulk of the population lived. They did huge damage to the cities and all stops in between, and then the Soviet Union collapsed.

A pro-Soviet president in Kabul found himself surrounded by hostile, hate-filled people who had gathered into oppositional groups under their local strongmen. These were the mujahedeen, folk riven by the invasion into ideological, religious and ethnic fragments formed of necessity for self defence. Whereas formerly Afghanistan had been a nation, if a poor one, the Soviet invasion shattered old alliances and made a jigsaw of what had been a land of settled tribes, independent farmers and wandering herders.

These people had had little use for literacy and relied instead on family, clan and religious loyalties to make their way through life. There was an educated elite and a functioning, if distant, government in Kabul that did the work of establishing the standing of the nation in the world.

During the invasion, international powers took advantage of the opportunity to block Soviet expansion and push their own agenda in this landlocked country. So on top of the divisions already wrought by Soviet ideology trying to spread itself through an essentially feudal land, there were now the deadly divisions of international rivalries.

Between five and ten million people fled Afghanistan during the Soviet era. Approximately two thirds of them left via Pakistan and the other third via Iran. With the exception of the Sunni states of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and to some extent, Egypt, the international community lost interest; they regarded it as their win against the Soviets.

But it was the world’s loss. A great many displaced Afghans had made their way into camps around the Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar. There, their poverty had been exploited. With support from outside, Sunni extremists controlled the camps and set up schools where young refugee boys were fed, clothed, schooled, given guns and taught to fight to establish a Sunni Islamic state in Afghanistan. The students were called Talibs and to have one in your family was to be offered protection. Without a boy in the Taliban, families could be degraded to the level of trading their daughters’ virtue for food and water. The Taliban were, by default, the only alternative to death and degradation for the poorest of the poor.

Four to five years after the Soviets left, the Taliban were an insurgent militia, armed, trained and fighting for power against the rest of the mujahedeen inside Afghanistan, and in 1996, they made it to Kabul after the warlords of the Northern Alliance could not agree to sit down together and govern the country.

Initially, the Taliban were welcomed in Kabul, but their agendum to establish an Islamic state with Sharia Law soon became evident: they sent women home from school, sacked them from work and began to beat them in the streets for not wearing the head-to-toe attire and footwear that their extreme conservatism demanded. By default, Afghanistan had become a tyrannising state, harbouring extremists, and remained so until the United States, outraged by the events of 9/11, decided to invade.

By 2002, the NATO occupation paved the way for exiles to return home. They came back to problems that had been compounding and accreting for years. They came knowing that the Taliban were not beaten, only subdued and sent, in their turn, into exile.

Among the homecomers was Dr Salehi.

You may ask what Australia can offer this unfortunate country. One thing is certain, the international community is going in there with megabucks. There are people on very large salaries in Afghanistan who are training local people in the art of keeping the peace. Afghan soldiers and police earn nothing approaching the salaries of their tutors. Likewise, NGOs pay their staffs salaries commensurate with being in a dangerous, distant place, using up much of the aid money. There are foreigners under contract to build infrastructure because local expertise is not there—sometimes their money comes from military budgets, diverting it away from aid.

Add to problems like these the nations standing in the wings, wanting to get their hands on Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which is extensive and has never been exploited. As these nations wait, there are huge covert operations going on in which foreigners of many nationalities are renting land from farmers and local landlords for illegal opium poppy crops—there is a lot of helicopter farming in Afghanistan. Afghans have had a long standing trade in opium and it makes up a very significant part of the country’s income. What we call graft and nepotism have always been part of the Afghan culture, as they were once part of European and Oriental feudalism.

Aid through science teaching in Afghanistan Listen to Sally Morrison on Ockham's Razor to hear how education is an important factor in the development of Afghanistan.

Dr Salehi and AADO are at a crucial time in their history, just as Afghanistan is with 2014 looming. At present she has a small staff of about five young Afghan men and one young woman. These people are very good at what they do, but are inclined to lose faith; two have families in far away Karachi and they are missing them. Most of them long to come to Australia, not realising that any work they might find in Australia would be far less meaningful than the work they are doing in their own home.

To remain an effective agency, Dr Salehi needs to retire from her work in nuclear medicine and go to Kabul to direct her group and expand its activities. To AADO’s science and life skills programs, she wants to add agriculture and food processing, both very necessary applications for a country without proper sanitation and refrigeration. Eventually she would like to be in a position to run a public science institute which would strengthen AADO’s bargaining power with any future government.

The fractured Afghan nation needs healing and holding together in the face of all that threatens it from outside and within, and Dr Salehi and AADO urgently need support from Australia to continue their very important work that is designed to both heal and hold. History makes the facts from the raw material: the raw material is a fractured, threatened nation—it can go under, and it probably will if nations like ours turn our backs—or it can start again through the roots of practical education that will provide it with purpose, direction and faith in itself.

Sally Morrison is a writer and former geneticist. This is an edited version of her comments on Ockham's Razor.

