Kabul—A recent analysis by the American magazine The National Interest has cast a sharp light on the Taliban regime’s systemic transformation of Afghanistan’s education system, revealing a strategy that uses schools and madrassas as “ideological weapons” to train a new generation for global jihad.
The report cautions that such an overhaul, which inculcates radical obedience and radicalism, is not just a cultural policy but an international menace that reflects the tactics of already formed terrorist entities such as al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Education of Obedience, Not Tradition
The National Interest’s report notes, “since 2021, the Taliban has encouraged madrasa schools, raising concerns about religious indoctrination and the spread of extremism in Afghanistan.”
That whole education system, says The National Interest, of state schools through religious madrassas, is now oriented towards inculcating total obedience and fanatical ideology.
More importantly, the Taliban form of Islam that is being instructed is given as an imported, dictatorial variety of Islam, as opposed to the long-standing national or Pashtun traditions of Afghanistan.
The report’s writer, Zalmai Nishat, said in a tweet that the Taliban are trying to erase the whole civilization.
Scholars stress that it is not education but ideological obedience, and the madrassa curriculum is customized to suit the training of global jihad.
In the report, leaked documents further indicate that the supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, envisions a long-term global jihadist mission.
The main aspects of this plan are to ensure total dominance of all state schools, introduce such ideological education, and actively disseminate the doctrine beyond the borders of Afghanistan.
Deep Nexus with Terror Groups
The severity of the strategy is enhanced by the fact that the Taliban has been proven to have connections with other transnational militias.
According to the United Nations, the Taliban has been reported to be linked to over 20 terrorist groups all over the region and around the globe.
The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a house belonging to the head of the Haqqani Network in Kabul served as startling evidence of the existence of this deep nexus, as it proved that high-profile militant leaders are safe under the Taliban.
The report concludes that such an ideological training policy is bound to make South and Central Asia unstable.
The Exclusion of Girls as a Security Risk
This ideological mission is also directly connected with the severely criticized ban on secondary and university education for girls introduced by the regime.
Report noted, “In December 2022, Hasht-e Subh, a daily online newspaper, leaked the Taliban’s internal assessment of Afghanistan’s school curriculum. Produced during the Doha negotiations, it proposed a complete overhaul designed to “Islamize” the system.”
The Taliban has explicitly indicated that the schools for girls could only open after their curriculum is considered ideologically consistent.
The fact that girls were not allowed to get an education should be considered as a critical measure of stability, and not a cultural problem. The policy option is directly linked to radicalization and weakened economic stability, and is, in effect, a reversal of decades of counterterrorism success that had been won against these very types of ideological networks.
The radicalisation of the Afghan education system along the Taliban lines is generating a threat to the future; the world will soon have to face a generation of people who perceive global jihad as their religious mission.
The report emphasizes that the stability in the region must come at the price of global responsibility so that the Taliban’s ideological brainwashing should not be exported.
Read more: Taliban Turn Education into Ideological Tool, Warns US Journal
