WASHINGTON, March 23: In what will be seen as a distinctly ironic twist to the campaign against religious extremism, it has been revealed that during the anti-Soviet drive, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with militant Islamic teaching and violent images.

The Washington Post said in a report on Saturday the textbooks formed part of covert US attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

“The primers,” the paper said, “which were filled with talk of jihad and features drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum.”

The Taliban also used the same textbooks — but after scratching out human faces in keeping with its strict interpretation of Islamic injunctions.

As Afghan schools reopen on Sunday, the Post report said, “the United States is back in the business of providing school books. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervour to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence.”

This US strategy was of course not confined to the writing of textbooks, observers here point out, but was practised on a wider political level by funding and encouraging extremist and right-wing Islamic organizations throughout the world. It was a deliberate strategy worked out by America’s cold warriors.

According to the Post, a “scrubbing” operation was launched last month in Pakistan to purge all references to rifles and killing from the textbooks. But many of the four million books now being sent into Afghanistan still feature Quranic verses and Islamic tenets. About 18 of the 200 titles the US is republishing are primarily Islamic instructional books, described as civics courses.

The books were published in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Centre for Afghan Studies. The agency reportedly spent US$51 million on the university education programmes in Afghanistan during the fight against Soviet occupation.