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The Need for Research (Or, Why You Should Not Write Newspaper Columns While High on Qat)
Tom Friedman's column today about how we can build more schools and defeat terrorism is one of those things that sounds right but probably isn't. Leave aside the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab -- by Friedman's own admission, the only reason he is in Yemen right now -- is a graduate of University College London and the product of a superb secondary education before that. Alan B. Krueger
This is no reason not to build schools. Building schools is a lovely thing, and as the great Greg Mortenson
[All that having been said, allow me to stress once again that building schools in underdeveloped societies is something we should all support. Maybe not for reasons of counter-terrorism or counterinsurgency but for more altruistic reasons. So everyone buy Greg Mortenson's new book
When is the last time Tom Friedman published an original out of the box thought anyway? Sure, we all loved From Beirut to Jerusalem, but that was a long time ago.
Another obvious and snarky point - which may or may not be related to Friedman's article, because I am not going to read it - is that educated females may become radicalized to all kinds of funny business, too. And I'm not just talking about "radical right wing" Hindu (-ish), Friedman (Milton)-reading types either.
Oh, sorry. I didn't really read your post either. I kind of skimmed it. What? It's not MY day job.
I kind of got hung up on the Mortenson part.
Good point on the evidence - or lack thereof - connecting education with terrorism. But more importantly, big up to you on your courageous public stand against the scourge that is Coldplay. And... go Red Sox!
Yup, I railed against Education spending a few postings back. I do not have anything against Education, it is a good thing. I am railing against a $4B dollar monolith that hemorages waste, then folks that say that the monoltih needs more money....go figure. That is here in the States.....
For COIN. I hear people wanting to create Iraq and Afghansitan in the US image. Women's rights(certain person in the States Department is always chanting Women's Rights for muslim countries)? Economies? Education? Freedoms? ...list goes on. Walk a mile in the shoes of the country that you want to impose these ideas on and then ask your self if the people in the country are ready for it. Respect their customs. The closer you get to the people, the more change they will accept.......it is their country not ours.
If they want a school, help them build one in their own way.
PS....Building schools in Iraq, Afghanistan, homes in Haiti. Just saw on ABC news that green jobs are going overseas. 80% of the money that goes in to windfarm building goes overseas. A $450M windfarm in Texas, paid for by US taxpayer green stimulus dollars is being subcontracted out to the Chinese.....US taxdollars putting 2,000 Chinese to work (turbines are Chinese made)......with our stimulus package????? Thought the US was broke??? U6 unemployement 20%.....................I am getting worn out, .......how many schools do we have to build in Afghanistan to get the US economy back on track?
I would agree that the causal relationship between education and terrorism as such is not foolproof. But that does not mean it doesn't exist on a statistical level. Consider the family of the chistmas / underpants bomber: the vast majority of the family was against the plan, with the father even turning him in ... So it's 1 out of 5? 10? where education did not work.
Also: the problem in Afghanistan is not just Al Quaida, but the Taliban (who will, if they win, provide safe haven to terrorists). And schools do work against the Taliban by reducing their numbers:
- in the short run by convincing the fence sitters that they have to gain more from supporting the Gov than theTaliban .
- in the medium run by keeping the kids away from Taliban madrassas where they would get brainwashed into suicide bombers
- in the long run by educating the population, thereby creating wealth, reducing the potential number of extremists (see above).
I dont' know If I posted this in English already somewhere, but if I were king for a day I would
- create one or more US / ISAF universities / colleges
- with immunity from Afghan law and its own police force (kinda what exists in Saudi Arabia)
- with lots of boarding stipends based on entrance exams
- print books (and produce CD's) covering all the knowledge required to pass the entrance exams. Include knowledge on western thought (human rights, basic philosophy etc).
- Print and distribute those books to all students for free (yes, that is expensive. But less expensive than continuing the surge for many years ...). Also produce some in-depth teacher materials (books, cd's and online), so that they can help the students after school to prepare for the entrance exam.
This way you avoid sovereignty concerns about the school curriculum (and if teachers use these materials in class because their own gov doesn't give them better stuff, that's not your fault ... ;-) )
One of the major reasons that education is weakly correlated with terrorism prevention is economic -- a well-educated populace that faces few opportunities upon completion of their education is often a hotbed of radicalization.
"a well-educated populace that faces few opportunities upon completion of their education is often a hotbed of radicalization."
Gee for a while there I thought you were talking about the 2010 university grads in the United States........
Education is to terrorists as antibiotics to bacteria? Get rid of 99% but make that last 1% into ever smarter superbugs? That would be a conundrum. D'oh!
Listen, I'm all for trashing Tommy for his often ludicrous articles, but doesn't he a point here?
One reason for the Taliban's recruitment being as effective as it has been is because of the considerable wages that it offers, especially when you consider average per capita income and the salary for an ANA or ANP recruit. That said, since education does often lead to an decrease in poverty and the like, wouldn't it make the Taliban's material incentives seem less popular?
"That said, since education does often lead to an decrease in poverty and the like, wouldn't it make the Taliban's material incentives seem less popular?" - Shanti
Good point, but what's the time line in this particular scenario, Shanti? :)
Economic incentives are not the only incentives, or motivations, to considered.
On a side note, and not really applicable to this scenario, but to Pakistan perhaps?:
"The Private Schools No One Sees
In the world’s slums, the poor have taken to educating themselves."
drat, I got that wrong
"These organic educational institutions captivated Tooley. Over the last ten years, he has labored to learn more about them, to publicize their existence and their successes, and to battle against the idea that they are insignificant. He passionately recounts this decade-long study in The Beautiful Tree, a book that should shake up adherents of traditional wisdom on education.
“Development experts,” as Tooley calls them, have long believed that if citizens of developing countries are to be educated, their governments, helped by heaps of money from rich nations, must invest in free and universal public schooling. If the resultant public education is lousy—as it is in India, for instance—then it must simply be reformed through more money and more regulation. Meanwhile, the poor must be patient." - City Journal
http://city-journal.org/2009/bc0619lj.html
>>education only has a place in counterinsurgency -- most naturally a subfield of stabilization operations -- if you can prove that a lack of schools is a driver of conflict.
Not too sure about that - Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities makes the point nicely: schools transform societies.
Spending money on shooting people - or bunging £5bn or so to the Pakistan army - doesn't seem to work either. But we don't stop doing that.
I'm a big fan of Abu Keira's snark. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not.
Andrew, you are absolutely correct on this, as usual.
We should come up with a list of Great Female Terrorists for the blog someday.
When you do, be sure to include Buñuel's beautiful guerrilla from the Republic of Miranda who is "better qualified for making love than making war."
The effect of education on terrorism seems a lot stronger if you take a generation long view. But only, as you say, if it's matched with commensurate opportunities to exercise your education in your daily life, and get rich. I fear Zak's point may reverberate in our future.
Oz
Shanti -- One reason for the Taliban's recruitment being as effective as it has been is because of the considerable wages that it offers, especially when you consider average per capita income and the salary for an ANA or ANP recruit. That said, since education does often lead to an decrease in poverty and the like, wouldn't it make the Taliban's material incentives seem less popular?
Education raises people out of poverty in systems where better options (better pay, really) are available to those who improve themselves. It's not clear that this is the case in Afghanistan. If you get a bunch of college grads there, where are the jobs they're going to take? This isn't just a problem in developing countries, either -- there are thousands of college-educated Poles working as barmaids and English tutors in Dublin, for example, because of high unemployment rates and a lack of jobs in Poland.
Friedman's argument is based on the contention that you can educate people into making "better" political choices, as we define them. As Ex tells us, the evidence on this is far from conclusive (and usually suggests the opposite). Olivier Roy has good stuff on this in Globalized Islam.
It's always best to keep the peasants ignorant and dependent on the local priest (imam) for their information; then the lord (tribal chief) only has to control the local priest (imam) to keep the peasants in line. Best we work on those tribal chiefs and keep the peasants ignorant; wouldn't want any independent thinkers here.
Interesting that in your previous post (9 Feb) there is a tacit theme of the importance of education to the creation of the learned beliefs, prejudices, etc. of Marines, Soldiers, et al and that they require Education to understand what these beliefs are, how they impact their environment and how to shed them when the circumstances dictate. Yet you do not see the relationship between the Education (some could call it Information Operations in the broadest sense) and the "Schools" required to set the conditions for this education. You do not see the direct applicability of this to COIN OPS? Perhaps the linkages and metrics you seek are not the right ones... My first read of your blog - I'm now wondering just how deep you think about the interdependencies and secondary/tiertiary impacts of the concepts you blog about.... I suspect you can do much better with this one - perhaps you were pressed for time.
Also, qat is not a hallucinogen, like TF says. It's a stimulant.
I hook into the educating girls angle more than anything. Better educated, teach other women, have less babies, better abel to provide for the babies they do have, and the benefits... 20 years down the track we have less youth bulge, less young men without jobs radicalizing due to lack of opportunity.
But its hand in glove, education without opportunity is just fodder for angst.
Education needs to be a active part of COIN. But its dividends pay much later and I don't see a lot of patience for that type of development work. which is a shame because its the long term solutions that will lift places like Afghanistan out of the badlands and allow them to engage the global economy .
Otherwise we may as well just build a fence around the poor, uneducated and cot off parts of the world and leave them to their own devices.
Good stuff Gulliver.
Friedman, like most regular op-ed columnists, is a dilettante who claims to be an authority on issues he knows knowing about. You got it right Andrew that schools are meaningless in COIN unless it is a driver of conflict. In fact, a lot of non-COIN development work we do is also meaningless since it doesn’t address the structure problems keeping a country down. Just look at all the money blown in Africa over the last few decades. Many of these project just make people feel good or address the wailings of the "do something" folks but does little really change the situation.
Good post.
RJS’s latest post at D3 Blog: She Wants Revenge
This is only a contradiction if you look at it from an enemy-centric perspective; a lot of top terrorists are engineers, therefore we need to...cut off the supply of education? No. Surely the point is the benefit of education to *everyone else*? In that it strengthens society to resist the insurgent?
You might be interested in the following post, from Foreignpolicy.com. I'm not saying it provides a concrete link between education and lack of extremism, but it's worth looking at:
Educate boys, or they'll go to war
Posted By Mardy Shualy Monday, November 9, 2009 - 5:23 PM
A World Bank research paper posted today finds that countries with a high proportion of young males with low levels of secondary education are significantly more conflict-prone. The combination of these "youth bulges" and low rates of secondary education is especially likely to lead to conflict in low- and middle-income countries, the authors also report. The findings focus particularly on Sub-Saharan Africa, as "the continent with the largest youth cohorts and the lowest levels of male secondary education, scoring on average nearly 30 percentage points lower than the world average."
Countries outside of the region also call for concern. In Syria, for example, males 14 years old and younger make up nearly 20 percent of the population. Only 39.1 percent of secondary school-aged students are enrolled in school, making it the 101st lowest-ranking country of 135 surveyed. In the long run, Syria is facing declining oil production and rapid population growth - a recipe for violent unrest.
The policy implications are clear. Programs that focus on primary education, like the U.N.'s Education for All and Millennium Development Goals programs are important (after all, students have to read and write before they can pursue secondary schooling), but there must be more support for programs like the World Bank's own Secondary Education in Africa initiative.
The total cost of a secondary education in Kenya is estimated at $6,865. A 2007 Oxfam report found that on average a "war, civil war, or insurgency shrinks an African economy by 15 percent," and conflict causes the continent to lose about $18 billion a year. You do the math.
C'mon, don't dis Coldplay! It hurts your argument. Coldplay could be an important part of educating the Muslim masses.
TF is often infuriating, but this one was over the top. Consider: Yemen is fighting 2 civil wars, is running out of oil revenues and also WATER! From a Yemen-centric perspective, AQ-Wahhabis-madrassas....all the usual suspects pale in comparison. Ali Abdullah Saleh should be in a "reflective mood" all right, as he brought all this upon his country and promises more of the same as the dynastic privleges extend to his son. Some questions for AAS AND TF to ponder:
*Why did the quality of the school system decline even as it was extending across the country? Try the education budget. Just where have the oil revenues gone...it seems NOT for education and NOT for development? No surprise that others would fill the gap. Weapons? For what?
*What plan does AAS have in mind for the country going dry and for the day when there are no further oil revenues? And just what used to grow on those beautiful terraced mountain slopes before quat took it all over?
*The AAS solution seems to be to let it get out of control and then have others fish him out. The Gulf countries are talking about development assistance, but NOT through the Yemeni government. The US is also jumping in and no surprise...is sticking by their man!!! No pondering the idea that if the next election were to be a real one, it might relieve the civil war pressure by giving regional, sectarian and tribal interests a different way to be expressed.
TF seems to have been more than a little taken by the Qat as to not ask some hard questions to his "American educated" friends.
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