Quotes of the Day

The White House says it understands that the solution to the war in Afghanistan is not purely military. Officials have declared a concomitant "civilian surge" of experts to bolster the embattled country's bureaucracy and economy along with the greater number of troops. But if the U.S. is truly committed to long-term security and stability in Afghanistan, it should be investing in the one pivotal sector that has received scant attention from the international community: education.

Short-term literacy and vocational programs, popular with donors, abound. As do school buildings up to the latest Western standards — some even have wheelchair-accessible ramps, in a country where there are few sidewalks and even fewer wheelchairs. Politicians back in the U.S. like to point to these projects as examples of taxpayer dollars being put to good use, and often cite the exponential number of girls in schools, some 2 million today compared to zero in 2001, as proof of success. But those schools are meaningless if there are no good teachers. In many rural parts of the country, teachers, if they can be found, often have a reading level only a few years beyond that of their students. That's not enough to build a functioning economy, a civil sector or a stable government, let alone an army capable of fighting an insurgency.

"An army's ability to fight depends on the quality of its logistics planning," an American soldier in Afghanistan recently told me. In the U.S. it can be taken for granted that the lowest grunt has basic reading, writing and computing skills. Not so in Afghanistan, where many of the desperately poor enlistees sign up with a fingerprint or the equivalent of a scrawled X. Yet the Obama strategy for Afghanistan envisions an indigenous military that will soon be able to take over security from its American and international mentors. How can a largely illiterate army plan the complex logistics that allow soldiers to be clothed, armed, fed and transported where they are needed? While Afghan soldiers are undeniably brave on the battlefield, their skills with anything other than basic tactics and small-to-medium firearms are limited. One frustrated American trainer of Afghan soldiers confided to me that his Afghan mortar team was going nowhere. With little understanding of geometry, the soldiers were depending on guesswork, rather than precision degrees, to aim their indirect fire — in a populated region where one or two degrees off could mean the difference between dead goats and dead civilians.

The Afghan National Army is one of the most widely respected institutions in the country, perceived to be free of the corruption and nepotism that plague the central government in Kabul. Yet it would be a mistake to focus on the military to the detriment of developing the civil and governance sectors, even if a robust army suits the U.S.'s immediate goals in Afghanistan. One need only look across the border to Pakistan, where 60 years of weak civilian governance interspersed with frequent military coups have created a nation perpetually in crisis and a haven for global terrorism. One of the best ways to encourage a strong and stable civil society is through education — not just basic literacy, but a thorough grounding in fundamentals such as mathematics, history, religion, literature and politics.

The problem with using development funds for education is that results are difficult to quantify over short periods of time. Even with a state-of-the-art teacher-training college, something desperately needed in Afghanistan, it would take at least four years to see qualified instructors placed in rural schools. But there is another way to spend money on education that is quantifiable, sustainable and quickly effective. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union provided thousands of university scholarships annually to Afghan students. The only condition — set by the Afghan government — was that each of those students return to Afghanistan immediately upon graduation. In Afghanistan, many of the most qualified professors, bureaucrats, filmmakers and technocrats are products of that program. Today, India is providing similar scholarships to some 500 Afghan students a year.

That number needs to increase. While elementary enrollment in Afghanistan reached 7 million this year, there are only 60,000 university places. Ultimately Afghanistan has to build its own educational institutions that can graduate qualified professionals, including teachers. But while it does that, the U.S., and its international partners, can help expedite the process by launching an international scholarship program. Not just to the U.S., as the Fulbright program does, but around the world. Yes, there is a possibility that scholarship students will abscond or seek asylum — the program will have to take those risks into account. But every year donors will be able to quantify the money spent on education and, in a generation or less, not only Afghanistan but the U.S. will begin to reap the rewards.

• Aryn Baker
• The most powerful weapon for winning the war in Afghanistan is educating its people