That article, though I appreciate the intention of the author, has quite a few inaccuracies, IMHO.
The public education system, in particular, is a catastrophe. I’ve dropped in on Pakistani schools where the teachers haven’t bothered to show up (because they get paid anyway), and where the classrooms have collapsed (leaving students to meet under trees). Girls have been particularly left out. In the tribal areas, female literacy is 3 percent.
The author has failed to mention the most important reform required in the education system, namely the change of curriculum. Building schools or educating girls will not lead to a better Pakistan (and by corollary a safer world), if the curriculum is not fixed. If the Grade X Biology textbook starts with a Koranic verse on jihad, that country is doomed. If Pakistani children will only learn about jihad and kafir even in a mainstream school because that is what the curriculum wants to teach them, it is better that they remain uneducated.
There’s an instructive contrast with Bangladesh, which was part of Pakistan until it split off in 1971. At that time, Bangladesh was Pakistani’s impoverished cousin and seemed pretty much hopeless. But then Bangladesh began climbing a virtuous spiral by investing in education, of girls in particular.
That is an unfair comparison. The Bengali population of East Pakistan, because of historical reasons, had always been more forward-looking than their West Pakistan counterparts. Even after 1947, the influences on them were positive enough to steer them to a better course.
We continue to be oblivious to trade possibilities. Pro-American Pakistanis fighting against extremism have been pleading for years for the United States to cut tariffs on Pakistani garment exports, to nurture the textile industry and stabilize the country. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, told me that his top three goals are “market access, market access, market access.” But Washington wants to protect North Carolina textile mills, so we won’t cut tariffs on Pakistani goods. The technical word for that: myopia.
The quota system as part of GATT under which Pakistan benefitted was withdrawn only in c. 2005. Terrorism had been well and truly and deeply entrenched in the Pakistani psyche much before that. 'Market access' is a mantra that Pakistan has been repeating to gain undue advantage.
It has been reassuring to see the work of people like Greg Mortenson, whose brave school-building in Pakistan and Afghanistan was chronicled in “Three Cups of Tea.” Ditto for Developments in Literacy, or D.I.L., which builds schools for girls in Pakistan that are the most exhilarating things I’ve seen there.
It costs $1,500 to sponsor a D.I.L. classroom for a year, and that’s just about the best long-term counterterrorism investment available.
Again, without a change in curriculum and without disabusing Pakistani minds that jihad in the 21st century was not tolerated and that Pakistan is not the leader of the 'ummah' and that the nation cannot simply survive on hatred as a state policy, there is no redemption.
