WASHINGTON, Nov 22: The US State Department and the CIA funded an education programme in Afghanistan from 1994 to 1998 which also produced books for Taliban that encouraged schoolchildren to fight infidels, says a book, The Devil’s Game.

“During the US-Taliban era of cooperation from 1994 to 1998 — which ended with the bombings of two US embassies in Africa...a key Unocal consultant ... was a University of Nebraska academic named Thomas Goutierre,” says author Bob Dreyfuss.

Unocal, which is one of America’s largest oil companies, was then negotiating a deal with the Taliban for an oil pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan.

According to the book, funding for Mr Goutierre’s work came from the State Department’s Agency for International Development while the CIA was also one of the sponsors.

“It turned out that Mr Goutierre’s education programme consisted of ... creation of children’s textbooks in which Afghans were taught to count by enumerating dead Russian soldiers and adding up Kalashnikov rifles,” the book says.

“Six million of these American printed and American financed ... textbooks were vetted with our knowledge by a council of Sunni and Shia clerics who were the chosen religious representatives of key warlords with whom we were allied in the fight against the Russians,” says John Stuart Blackton, a retired senior officer of the US Foreign Service, who was also associated with the project.