Taliban's Illusion of Exceptions

 

Literacy Is Not Enough: Why Education Alone Cannot Build an Afghan Nation

For much of my life, I believed that education was Afghanistan's best hope for overcoming tribalism. If more Afghans learned to read, attended universities, and studied history, philosophy, and science, I assumed they would gradually see themselves less as members of tribes and more as citizens of a single nation.

I still believe education is indispensable. But after watching Afghanistan's political evolution over the past four decades—and observing debates even among the Afghan diaspora—I have come to question one assumption that once seemed self-evident: literacy and university degrees do not automatically create national thinking.

Nearly a century ago, Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria conducted a remarkable study in Central Asia. Working among communities where some people had recently become literate while others had not, he discovered that literacy changed the way people reasoned. Illiterate villagers tended to interpret the world through concrete experience. They grouped objects according to what they resembled in everyday life and hesitated to answer hypothetical questions that fell outside their lived experience. Those who had received even a modest education were more comfortable thinking in abstract categories and reasoning from general principles.

Luria's conclusion was profound. Literacy is more than the ability to read and write; it reshapes how the mind approaches ideas. But he never argued that literacy makes people wiser, more ethical, or more public-spirited. It provides the tools for abstract thought. How those tools are used depends on values, culture, and leadership.

I want to be careful here about what Luria's study actually shows and what I am doing with it. His research was about cognitive style—how the mind classifies objects and handles hypothetical reasoning—not about political values or group loyalty. What follows is my own extension of his insight, not a direct application of his findings: if literacy sharpens the instruments of reasoning without dictating what they are used for, then it stands to reason that an educated population could deploy those instruments toward national unity just as easily as toward tribal or ethnic competition. Luria gives me a mechanism to think with. Afghanistan's experience is where I have tried to test it.

And that experience has often been disappointing.

After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, millions of Afghan children entered schools. Universities expanded. Thousands earned degrees abroad. Many of us believed this educated generation would gradually weaken ethnic and tribal divisions that had haunted Afghan politics for generations.

Yet the opposite often seemed to occur, at least among the most visible voices in Afghan public life. This is an impression formed from watching Afghan politics, media, and diaspora debate over many years, not a claim I can back with systematic data—and I want to be upfront about that limitation rather than dress up an observation as a finding. But the pattern I noticed was this: some of the most vocal defenders of ethnic politics were not illiterate villagers isolated in remote valleys. They were politicians, professors, journalists, and activists—people who could quote history, interpret constitutions, and skillfully argue their positions. Education had sharpened their ability to reason and persuade. It had not necessarily broadened their sense of belonging.

The lesson, if the pattern holds, is uncomfortable but important. Education teaches people how to think. It does not necessarily teach them what to value.

A lawyer can use legal knowledge to defend equal citizenship or to justify exclusion. A historian can use history to build a shared national narrative or to deepen old grievances. A political scientist can advocate institutions that unite a country or arguments that divide it. The same intellectual tools can serve very different purposes.

When I was growing up in Afghanistan during the 1960s and 1970s, ethnic identity certainly existed, but it was rarely the defining feature of everyday political discussion. Most people simply accepted that they were Afghans while also belonging to particular ethnic communities.

The decades of war that followed changed that balance. The Soviet invasion, civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the political order established after 2001 all intensified ethnic competition. Historical grievances resurfaced. Political power increasingly came to be viewed through an ethnic lens.

The Karzai and Ghani presidencies are often cited in these debates, and I raise them here as illustration rather than as proof of a trend. Many observers believed that President Hamid Karzai's efforts to include individuals from different communities in senior government positions helped ease some of these tensions, even if imperfectly. Under his successor, Ashraf Ghani, perceptions of exclusion grew in some quarters. Fairly or unfairly, a number of Afghans came to believe that key decisions and appointments increasingly reflected narrower political and ethnic networks rather than a genuinely inclusive national vision. I say "perceptions" deliberately: I am not in a position to adjudicate how accurate those views were, only to note that they took hold and that they deepened mistrust at a moment when Afghanistan badly needed unity. Readers who follow Afghan politics closely may reasonably weigh this period differently than I have.

The Taliban's return to power has only intensified these concerns. Many Afghans believe that senior appointments have become concentrated among individuals drawn from particular regional and tribal networks, reinforcing fears among other communities that the state belongs to some Afghans more than others. Whether those perceptions are entirely accurate or not, they have strengthened ethnic consciousness instead of encouraging a shared national identity.

This raises a difficult question. If education alone cannot overcome tribalism, what can?

The answer, I believe, lies in civic education rather than literacy alone—though I want to be honest that this is a harder prescription than the diagnosis that precedes it, and Afghanistan is not the first country to reach for it without success. Civic education has been tried, in some form, in many post-conflict societies, and it fails as often as it succeeds. It fails when it is imposed from outside without local buy-in, when it is treated as a subject to be tested rather than a practice to be lived, or when the political leadership that is supposed to model national unity is itself organized along factional lines. Rwanda's post-genocide civic curriculum and South Africa's post-apartheid efforts at "nation-building" education offer instructive contrasts: both show that formal curriculum change can shift how a younger generation talks about identity, but neither shows that it can do so quickly, cheaply, or independent of what political elites actually do in practice.

With that caveat, the core elements are still worth naming. Schools should teach students not only mathematics and grammar but also the principles of equal citizenship, constitutional government, mutual respect, and the responsibilities that come with belonging to one nation. Universities should encourage critical thinking that challenges inherited prejudices rather than merely equipping students to defend them more eloquently. And civic education cannot be left to schools alone—it has to be reinforced by how power is actually distributed, because students quickly learn to distrust lessons in equal citizenship when the appointments pages of the news tell a different story.

A nation is not created simply because people can read books. It is created when citizens decide that their common future matters more than the accidents of birth—and when their leaders give them reason to believe that decision will be honored.

Afghanistan has produced many educated men and women. What it still needs is a generation willing to use its education not to perfect the language of tribal competition but to imagine a political community that belongs equally to every Afghan.

Literacy opens the mind. Nationhood opens the heart. Afghanistan will need both if it is ever to escape the cycle of division that has defined so much of its modern history.