ON June 2, 2012, Karen Freeman, the deputy director for the United States Agency for International Development, spoke at a pre-departure orientation event held for some members of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan.

The event marked the initiation of a programme through which 172 deans and university officials and provincial and national education secretaries from colleges and universities all over Pakistan would be travelling to Columbia University in New York. While there, the officials will receive training on strategic planning and policy development as it relates to education in Pakistan.

The trip is only one of the many initiatives related to education that have been funded by USAID. A perusal of the USAID Pakistan page reveals several more such programmes, schools funded in rural areas, plans to improve women’s education — all in all a heartening bouquet of good intentions in a land where a large percentage of the population lives in extreme educational poverty.

The timing of the US-funded trip for Pakistani educators is also fortunate. Last week, the budget was marked on the Pakistani calendar as the moment for a collective national lament over the lack of funding for learning and the overspending on bombs amid similar complaints. How comforting then to hear of a benevolent project to educate our educators on improvements in this ignored sector.

The United States is not the only benefactor interested in popularising the love of learning in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s other faithful benefactor, has over the years been involved in similar philanthropic contributions. One of these ventures, the International Islamic Relief Organisation runs a large orphanage in Islamabad, which educates, houses and clothes thousands of young destitute Pakistani children.

This orphanage is but one public face of Saudi investment in Pakistan education; the private face is equally well known.

One Wikileaks cable from late 2008 by the American consulate in Lahore records in detail the activities of Saudi charities in funding hundreds of Deobandi-oriented religious schools in those areas. Like the Americans, the Saudis also fund teacher training and invite hundreds of madressah educators to Saudi Arabia on fully funded trips for just this purpose.

The Saudi and American efforts to educate Pakistanis are substantively different. The Americans are pushing a curriculum that ostensibly promotes democracy and pluralism, imagines the child as a budding scholar and not a soldier, the world as holding opportunity and not only temptation.

The Saudi curriculum banks on other truths — of salvation gained in another life, of a world of ascetic self-sacrifice, of the necessity of domination and the inevitability of destruction. The American promises are of here and now — open to being evaluated on the scales of reality — the Saudi ones for the hereafter, untouchable and perfect in their utopic potential.

The distinctions between the two kinds of education can occupy several tomes but their substantive differences and the superiority or relevance of one over the other often camouflages the common threads.

For both, the provision of learning, the construction of schools and the task of opening the poverty-stricken Pakistani mind is aligned directly and inextricably to warfare.

For the Americans, the construction of schools, training of teachers and provision of textbooks are meant to stanch the moral depravity of other killings — some targeted, others accidental — the grisly and sometimes meaningless horror of hovering drones, of war.

If there can be a school or training for every wedding party mistakenly targeted by a Hellfire missile and vaccination programmes used to catch a terrorist, war can be made to look like a campaign to uplift and empower.

The Saudi education recipe enables not some surreptitious camouflage of bombings but the creation of bombs themselves and cheaply produced foot soldiers.

There are ironies in the mix: the Saudis and the Americans are friends who chat frequently but never seem to see the opposing directions of their projects in Pakistan. Such are the friendships of the wealthy — the sportsmanlike tolerance of dear friends at the hunt, where one allows another to corner the deer and fire the rifle with the gentlemanly benevolence of those enormously endowed. The delivery, regardless of the one who fires the shot, is death.

Pakistan’s educational woes are of long standing and well-known. In our current time of hardship as we beg and borrow to fill our tanks with petrol and light our stoves with gas, few have tears left to shed over the inaccessibility of the ABCs to the children weaving in and out of traffic at intersections, knotting up rugs in poorly lit mud huts.

Those costs of education Pakistan shares with scores of other developing nations that bend under the weight of demographics stuck in the darkness of illiteracy. What is unique to Pakistan, what amounts to a war on education in this country is the subjugation of education to warfare both from within and without, and the transformation of learning from a weapon against war to a weapon of war.

The agendas of Saudi Arabia and the US may be markedly different, but their strategies and their sly co-option of the good, the eye-opening, the liberating into mere packaging for warfare, make education the empty morsel that fills the stomach but provides no sustenance.

The war on education in Pakistan then is a consequence of the tying together of war and education. The consequences are not just the threat of continuing illiteracy resulting from the performance of a government that cannot deliver or refuses to do so, or a military that takes for the barracks what was meant for books and blackboards.

They also entail a population sceptical of school because it is linked to soldiers and teachers who teach first about fighting and only sometimes about the future.

The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law. rafia.zakaria@gmail.com