From the movie Scarface:
Look at chyoo now!
The Afghan National Police are on the frontlines with the Army. That makes the total in uniform at 357,000. Do you stand by your word that it should be noted?
NATO is expanding the Afghan armed forces to about 260,000 active personnel by 2015, a move supported and funded primarily by the United States Department of Defense.[3
From Wikipedia.
Why didnt WereKoala have at least a general impression of what has transpired in Afghanistan regarding the size Afghan Security Forces. That is kind of the point of this thread. How can that be?
The point of the thread was school,ing, but you lost that point by failing to respond to direct questions.
The rest is wind and piss.
Well played, you went to the same source I did when I said that your figures would make the Afghan army the 17th largest in the world, even ahead of the UK. I had already looked there before I asked you for a cite.
So what was your cite before you were challenged, and why didn’t you post it earlier?
C’mon, don’t be ashamed to cite lib talking points and websites, NFW - it’s what shills do.
No. the point includes all positive news. Read my posts.
Nice cop out. It was expected.
So WereKoala didnt look up Afghan Security Force numbers until today?
This thread is necessary. Many Americans are not up on the facts.
Yes, it’s crucially important that Americans know the exact size of the Afghan Security Forces. Especially since your own cite says:
Not to mention that what is really important is quality, not quantity. But that would fall under “bad news”, and so probably not something Americans should be informed about.
The current good news is that Afghan Security Forces are holding their own agsinst insurgents.
And yet you think that the gains made so far will most likely deteriorate significantly by 2017.
Nope.
Cynics make me sick.
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/afghanistan_70611.html
^ It’s just as well the thread isn’t about you, then.
Fwiw, you have lost all credibility on the schooling issue by refusing to even acknowledge, let alone provide examples of, qualitative data to support you primary assertion: you have absolutely no idea what happens once the school ‘register’ is read to the alleged 10 million children, even though it is clearly in the interests of those receiving aid to report results.
You could almost wonder why they are keen to promote a basic number(the ’10 million’), and nothing else.
Pretty bad.
National Education Strategic Plan for Afghanistan, Ministry of Education
As for why this is:
[QUOTE=BrokenBriton]
who is assessing reading and writing skills - you are surely not projecting a version of ‘education’ based on your own experience, that would obviously be hopelessly naive and silly?
[/quote]
There hasn’t been much in the way of standard assessments. This is a country that can’t even reliably report how many people are in its army, after all.
This study was an effort to measure education outcomes in Afghanistan:
The results were poor:
That paper also identifies a key bottleneck in Afghani education: grade 5.
After that, pass rates improve. It seems that children either leave school around grade 5, or stay in and do reasonably well.
One other bit of positive news is that youth literacy is now estimated to surpass adult literacy:
The effort to educate Afghani children is sizeable and genuine, but the obstacles facing it are tremendous.
And, sadly, the Obama administration predicts that it will get significantly worse in the next few years. However, if you ask Americans if they think we should keep more troops in Afghanistan to ensure a better educational outcome for the children, I’m certain the overwhelming answer would be: NO! We’ve done our bit, and now it’s up to them.
That’d be my answer as well. Even beyond the “we’ve done our bit” sentiment, which is perfectly acceptable, I’d argue that there are limits to the amount of cultural change that can be imposed from without by foreigners. Real, systemic change to Afghan society, if it’s to occur and stick, will probably only happen in the absence of Americans.
Actually, Afghanistan in the 1950s (under the King) was a much more liberal place. Women wore western dress, there was a non-Islamic university system, and Christians and Jews were accepted. the fall of the monarchy
Indeed. And to be frank, our military folk are basically trained to destroy things and kill people. Giving them the task of “nation building” is rather naive.
Thanks for digging that out. For those who didn’t look at the pdf, it’s a summary of earlier studies - some perhaps more tokenistic while others seem credible. Many date back 10 years and even 13 years.
… is a view.
Certainly the establishment of a primary (school) curriculum appears to be significant.
The quality of teaching appears to be very poor, less than half the schools have walls and roofs (unhelpful in that climate) and assessment of teachers is, at best, piecemeal ánd the results alarming.
And that is the tip if that iceberg.
I think I have to go back to my initial assertion that a lot of emotionally-invested money and political grandstanding is invested in purporting to educate Afghani children … it serves very many indeed if poor outcomes are not reported, or even acknowledged.
Do you disagree with it?
[QUOTE=BrokenBriton]
Certainly the establishment of a primary (school) curriculum appears to be significant.
The quality of teaching appears to be very poor, less than half the schools have walls and roofs (unhelpful in that climate) and assessment of teachers is, at best, piecemeal ánd the results alarming.
And that is the tip if that iceberg.
[/quote]
Well, sure. Again, tremendous obstacles. Where are you going to find teachers in a country in which 80% of them fled, where a quarter of the population is literate? And, as the Strategic Plan mentions, while Afghani education is required to be consistent with Islam, it also must include “modern principles of inclusion and tolerance”, so poaching teachers from madrassas is off the table, and you’ve lost whatever portion of the population would be willing to teach, as long as the curriculum was radical Islamism. What educational traditions that exist are rooted in practices that are painfully outdated and ineffective: rote memorization, and corporal punishment.
How to you fund schools through one of the most corrupt governments on earth? Education spending accounts for about 17% of Afghanistan’s national budget, how much of that actually reaches the schools? Not much, I’d wager.
A bad education is better than no education, and what’s being delivered in Afghanistan now might be the best possible under the circumstances, or close to it.
As has been pointed out, heartbreakingly, this is probably the high point of modern Afghani education. Things will almost certainly decline as the U.S. withdraws troops and money.