THE mind-boggling sum of $87 billion that President Bush has sought from Congress for the ongoing war, stabilization and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan includes $11 billion for maintaining the US armed forces in Afghanistan and a sum of $800 million for the stabilization/reconstruction of Afghanistan.

The US has about 8,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and probably pays the full costs of the 3,000 odd soldiers from allied nations. In effect each soldier in Afghanistan is costing one million dollars annually. The US soldier does not come cheap, presumably because of the hi-tech equipment and ammunition he uses and the creature comforts which he has to be provided to maintain his combat fitness. There is also, of course, the question of the air support provided from land bases in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries and from aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea.

The figure is nevertheless mind-boggling when one considers that in the UN /NATO sanctioned operations in Kosovo and Bosnia, according to estimates prepared by the Stimson Centre’s expert on peacekeeping, it was calculated that each American soldier cost on average $215,436 per year in Kosovo and $219,737 in Bosnia, while the UN soldiers cost $119,365 in Kosovo, $46,500 in Ethiopia and $103,000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

One explanation lies perhaps in the cost of the services that the US military has farmed out to private contractors. A recent press report in the “Scotsman” says that an employee of an American Security Firm charged with guarding the CIA headquarters in Kabul is being paid $545 a day. Such per diems probably would mean that the firm in question was with its overheads etc charging the Pentagon or the CIA something in the neighbourhood of a million dollars per guard.

As against this the Americans will provide assistance to the tune of $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2004 to Afghanistan. This figure is made up of the $400 million which the state department belatedly provided in its aid budget after Congress pointed out that the original budget had included no money at all for Afghanistan and the $800 million that President Bush has now requested. There have also been reports that at the pledging conference on Afghanistan later this month the Americans will be looking for $600 million from other donors. The Canadians have promised $250 million. In any case it seems that no more than two billion dollars would be available in aid during 2004 and that figure has of course to be weighed against the estimated requirement of $20 billion in the next five years put forward by the usually knowledgeable and conservative Afghan Finance Minister Mr Ashraf Ghani.

In the meanwhile the Panjsheris remain in complete control of the defence ministry. The DDR programme (disarmament, demobilization and rehabilitation) of the UN remains a dead letter because for once the UN and the Japanese who are financing the programme have made it clear that until the defence ministry has been restructured to reflect the ethnic balance in Afghanistan there will be no implementation of the plan.

The power control of the defence ministry and other key positions gives to the Panjsheris and the extent to which they are prepared to misuse it, has become apparent from a recent report by a UN rapporteur regarding the illegal grabbing of huge swathes of land in Kabul by the Panjsheri ministers in Karzai’s cabinet. The rapporteur has been chastised by the UN chief Brahimi Lakdar for having made public an issue that he believed should have been discussed only privately.

Presenting a copy of this letter at a press conference Mr. Qanooni, the Panjsheri minister of education (former minister of interior) also claimed that the land was allotted by President Karzai and that it was therefore entirely legal and above board. It was not explained as to what occasioned the largesse or indeed why it was available only to the Panjsheri ministers.

The Loya Jirga planned for October has now been postponed to December. It is hoped that this will not disturb the other key date mentioned in the Bonn Agreement viz. the holding of elections in June 4. There seems to be little chance, however, that the UN officials charged with the task will be able to prepare the electoral roles and educate the approximately 10.5 million voters about the process by the due date.

The election unit of the UN had asked for $130 million to enable them to send some 5,000 plus Afghan enumerators and senior UN supervisors out into the field. They had asked for additional security. So far they have had to pare down the financing request to $86 million and there are no reports that this money has been approved by the donors yet. Presumably this will be something to be discussed at the donors’ conference later this month.

Even if the money is forthcoming how will the enumerators work if there has been no disarming and there is no plan for providing escorts from the ISAF to the enumerators? Certainly the PRTs are in no position to provide the needed security. In the best of circumstances completing the enumeration within the available time would have been difficult. In present circumstances it seems impossible..

Perhaps even more importantly those holding the reins of power in Kabul will not be particularly anxious to hold elections. It was my contention in meetings with American academicians and experts on Afghanistan early last year that the Panjsheris now holding power in Kabul would have difficulty being elected “dogcatchers” even in the Panjsher Valley itself.

Unlike Ahmad Shah Masood who was a charismatic figure, the wooden self-styled Marshal Fahim and the colourless Qanooni enjoyed no popular standing. They were Masood’s aides and they have shown no sign unlike Abdullah of having grown into the stature of the high offices they now hold. Even if they do hold the seats from the Valley they have no support elsewhere, not even in the so-called Northern Alliance.

In early August, the Panjsheris called a meeting of the Northern Alliance. Ex-president Burhanuddin Rabbani, whose support base is primarily among the Tajiks of Badakshan was conspicuous by his absence. Karim Khalili of the Hazaras was present but it is unlikely that he has quite forgotten the atrocities the Panjsheris had visited upon the Hazaras during their reign in Kabul in 1992-94 and the short shrift they received from the Shura-i-Nazar after the Taliban had been routed and power in Kabul was handed over nominally to the Northern Alliance but in practice to the Panjsheri faction alone. Maintaining an alliance with the Panjsheris would make little political sense to the Hazaras.

The Pushtun Abdur Rasul Sayaf was also at the meeting but he is essentially a hanger-on whose claim to fame or notoriety lay in his strong commitment to Wahabism and his facility with the Arabic language which enabled him to raise funds from Arab philanthropists. Since these funds are no longer available his association will be of little value to the Panjsheris.

Ostensibly the meeting was called to set up a new political party to contest the elections next year and to counter efforts that they feared would be made to influence the elections in favour of western educated Afghans. A month and a half has gone by and so far there seems to be no announcement of a new party. It does appear however that the Panjsheris are using the same tactics they used in the Loya Jirga in Kabul in ‘02 to try and intimidate the election commission into drawing up rules that would make it impossible for many Afghan expatriates to contest the elections and would restrict the number of constituencies from which the Pushtuns would be elected.

Lakdar Brahimi recently confessed that the problems of Afghanistan flow from the “original sin” of cobbling together a government in haste after the Taliban ouster. He is being kind to the UN system. The sin was deliberate and not occasioned by haste. The UN officials, long acquainted with Afghanistan, knew full well which elders from the Pushtun tribes and which influentials from the Hazaras, the Tajiks and Uzbeks should have been at the Bonn Conference if the warlord culture was to be done away with and genuine respect was to be given to the Afghan Loya Jirga tradition.

A wholly misplaced American bias in favour of the Panjsheris endorsed of course by such well wishers of Afghanistan as the Russians and Iranians was accepted without demur by the UN. Not only genuine representatives but even considerations of ethnic balance were cast to the wind. It did not help that the one person of Afghan origin that seemed to have the inside track with Secretary Rumsfeld happened to be Zalmay Khalilzad. It was he who endorsed the pressure tactics employed by Panjsheri intelligence officers to intimidate the delegates at the Loya Jirga in Kabul. Is this likely to be rectified now?

It is said that Rumsfeld is no longer calling the shots on Afghanistan. Latest rumours suggest that Zalmay is not now being considered for appointment as the American ambassador to Afghanistan. If so, it would suggest that there is a wind of change blowing. One can then perhaps hope that alongside the battle against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda remnants the Americans will also wage a battle to genuinely strengthen Karzai’s position and to prevent the Panjsheris from queering the pitch. Brahimi’s remarks quoted earlier suggest that the need is recognized but will it mean action? I am not optimistic.

The greater likelihood is that Karzai will remain under pressure to talk about the fact that all Afghanistan’s problems are owed to “interference from across the border” and that until this ceases there would be little chance of holding free and fair elections.

The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan.

PAKISTAN, indeed, has a split personality. A dualism in our life is most prominent in our education system How else would you describe a country which has 46 million adults who cannot read or write, and probably will never be able to learn. On the other hand, only a few thousand children receive the best education in high quality institutions with the best of facilities.

How would one explain this dichotomy in our education system? The problem has a long history behind it. With no tradition or culture of learning, the Muslims of India never considered education to be something worth investing in. How many universities did the great Mughal emperors leave behind along with the gardens and mausoleums which dot the South Asian landscape? Recognizing this fallacy in our approach, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan tried to make amends. But he failed to create a grassroot culture which regards education as a birthright and an essential element for human dignity and growth.

As a result, education has always been a low priority sector in Pakistan. Before capitalism and the market place gained unchallenged supremacy the world over, much to the detriment of the downtrodden class, it was widely recognized that it is the government’s responsibility to provide elementary education to the masses. This was the case not just in the socialist states with their principle of looking after the welfare of their citizens from the cradle to the grave. Even the fountainhead of capitalism — notably the United States — invests substantially in its education system. It knows that the marketplace thrives on competition and the only rule it recognizes is that of the survival of the fittest. Hence the need to educate its people.

The Third World countries with limited resources were faced with a dilemma because they had to divert their funds from other sectors if they wanted to invest in the schooling of their citizens. Some of them who were governed by rulers of vision managed to keep education high on their planning agenda and in the process managed to climb high on the ladder of progress. Sri Lanka, Cuba and even China (which after all began life as the People’s Republic as a developing country) are some outstanding examples and today have impressive literacy rates — 91.6, 96.7 and 85.2 per cent respectively.

What did Pakistan choose to do? It set up commissions after commissions to prepare reports which were never implemented. It also paid a lot of lip service to high sounding and noble ideas but never allocated more than 2.4 per cent of its GNP (in 1988-89) to this sector. Today we spend 1.7 per cent of our GNP on education when Unesco recommends at least four per cent. As the country’s macro-economic indicators and the GNP have grown, the education budget has expanded in absolute terms. But this has not been translated into an expansion of the school/college infrastructure because inflation and the monster of corruption have crept in to absorb these nominal increases in the education budget.

Today, the country has 162,200 primary schools (so the Pakistan Economic Survey 2002-2003 tells us) ‘educating’ 19.5 million children. Of course many of these institutions are ‘ghosts’ (the term coined in Pakistan to describe schools which exist only on paper) and obviously their students are ‘ghosts’ too. By the time they reach the middle level (class VI) the enrolment figure dwindles to 3.9 million. Where do these drop-outs go? They lapse into illiteracy (presuming they had learned something of the three ‘R’s during their brief stint in primary school) and when they are fifteen they will help inflate the pool of adult illiterates in Pakistan. With the population growing at the rate of 2.6 per cent per annum and the literacy rate growth being under one per cent, small wonder, the number of illiterates above 15 years of age in the country has been mounting steadily.

It would not be fair to say that the government has not been worried by this dismal state of affairs. Nearly everyone who matters and is in a position of authority speaks of his concern at the rot in the education sector. But the solutions which are being devised hardly address the core issues. The immediate need is to make education accessible and improve the quality of pedagogy and the school environment so that the children who are enrolled have an incentive to stay on in school. It is important that they complete at least ten years of schooling. That is long enough to give a person the basic knowledge and skills to enable him to improve his capabilities even if he does not study any further.

The government’s solution has been to induct the private sector into the field so that it shares the burden of this all important task of teaching the young. Given the contemporary trends, one cannot quarrel with this approach, especially when many of the private institutions are known to be imparting education of a really high standard. What is actually worrisome is that the government has used this strategy to start shedding off its own responsibility, thus leaving the people with no choices.

The number of new primary schools being opened in the country has been on the decline. Only 800 were opened last year when there was a time in the mid-nineties when as many as 5,000 or so new ones used to be set up annually. Given the failure of the government schools to educate the children who enter their fold, the number of children on their rolls has been falling. The private schools which have been encouraged are taking up a greater share of the school enrolment.

This is evident from the growing strength of their enrolment. According to Unesco’s Education for All: Global Monitoring Report 2002 , 34.8 per cent of the children in primary schools in Pakistan attend private schools. This is a very high rate when compared to other countries — US 11.6 per cent, India 17.9 per cent, Iran 4.4 per cent, and Sweden 3.4 per cent.

Since the private sector schools, which offer better education, are costly, it is plain that a large chunk of the population is deprived of worthwhile education . It is also obvious that a preponderant majority of those who make it to the top have studied in private schools. It is time a survey was undertaken of the institutions of higher learning to determine which schools their students attended.

While this would be an instructive exercise, some facts are mind-boggling. As it grapples with the primary education sector, the government has proceeded to expand the higher education sector at a rapid pace. It seems to be in a hurry to make up for the failings of yesteryear. The other day the Higher Education Commission released a list of institutions authorized to award degrees. It gave the names of 103 and 49 of them are in the private sector. Many of these had been operating for a number of years and have now been given a charter.

Thus the universities and institutes which have mushroomed in all major cities in response to the public need will come to be regulated. But one wonders how the government hopes to keep academic standards in the universities high if the base — that is, primary education — continues to be so weak and limited. From where will the institutions of higher education have their intake? Poorly educated school leavers will lower the standards of the universities. After all, their ultimate success or failure will depend on how well we educate our children in schools.