Lessons of life and death

SARKH DOZ, Afghanistan -- Remnants of the ousted Taliban regime have launched a campaign of arson, intimidation, and assassination targeting schools and teachers in southern Afghanistan, forcing some 200 schools to close in recent months, local officials say.

Five teachers have been killed, said Hayat Allah Rafiqi, head of the education department in Helmand province. Hundreds more teachers have received ''night letters" -- threatening notices nailed to their houses under darkness, warning them to quit teaching or die.

''Our teachers are helpless because security is so weak," Rafiqi said. ''By day the government rules, but by night it is the hand of the Taliban."

The attacks, which President Hamid Karzai estimated have idled 100,000 students in the south, have undermined attempts by the government to revive the country's educational system and teach both boys and girls -- a key to Afghanistan's recovery from decades of war. Girls were barred from attending school when the fundamentalist Islamic regime ruled the country in the 1990s.

While schools in Kandahar and Zabol provinces also have been targeted, Helmand has been particularly hard hit. Sixty-six of Helmand's 224 schools -- many of them built or repaired with American aid -- have closed, and others have reduced classes as parents move pupils to the safety of the main towns. Even there, protection is uncertain.

In one of the Helmand attacks, assassins dragged a teacher from his classroom in the village of Nad Ali and shot him at the school gate. His crime: teaching girls.

Two days later, gunmen burst into Karte Laghan secondary school in the provincial capital, Laskhar Gah, killing a watchman and a student. The attack occurred less than a mile from the new British military base.

''We are always afraid of being shot or attacked on our way home," said Gul Ali, a female teacher of chemistry and biology at the school.

In rural areas, schools are particularly vulnerable.

An arson attack in January destroyed the lone school in the sleepy settlement of Sarkh Doz, near the sluggish Helmand river. Now the playground is ghostly quiet, the gate is bolted shut, and all that remains of the yellow classrooms is a charred shell of cinders and ash.

Residents say militants in a station wagon pulled up, doused the building in gasoline, and struck a match. Then the car roared up the rutted road to the next village, Mangalzai, and torched a school there, too.

The attacks on the schools have dealt a blow to aid efforts in Helmand, the volatile southern province where US troops are currently handing control to a 3,300-strong British force.

''Terrible," said police chief Ahmed Samonwal, shaking his head as he walked past the blackened building in Sarkh Doz. ''This is the work of our enemies."

While some teachers have quit, most of Helmand's 1,500 teachers are defying the threats. For some, it is a matter of patriotism; for others, the security of a $50 monthly salary.

''Of course we are afraid," said one teacher, Abdul Hakim. ''But this is our duty. For the sake of the next generation, our country, and our children, we cannot quit our jobs."

Hakim, a man with piercing gray eyes under a dark turban, teaches 12-year-old boys at a school in Garmser district, a 90-minute drive south of Laskhar Gah. An atmosphere of fear pervades the town.

The police station is peppered with bullet holes since an attack by the Taliban in December that left nine dead. The town's school for girls is shut, Hakim said, and one of his colleagues who had received a night letter fled to Laskhar Gah. But the boys' school has not been targeted by the Taliban and remains open.

The Taliban's anti-education offensive is consistent with its virulent opposition to schooling for girls. But the campaign also serves a broader purpose -- to erode the tenuous authority of Karzai's government.

''This is not just about girls. The Taliban are against all education," said Sardar Muhammad of Mercy Corps, one of just five relief agencies operating in Helmand. ''Ignorant people are easier to control. When they were fighting their way to power [in the mid-1990s], only the uneducated were sent to the front."

The climate of terror also suits the province's drug barons with whom the Taliban have allied in recent months, local officials say. As a result, heroin and opium flow across the border into neighboring Pakistan and freshly trained insurgents travel from Pakistan in the opposite direction.

At his office, the newly appointed governor of Garmser, Haji Abdullah Jan, displayed an antitank mine rigged to a remote control device intended to kill him along a roadside earlier this month. ''Some villagers called me with a warning. Otherwise I would have driven into it," he said.

As NATO forces prepare to assume control in the south, securing the schools of Helmand will soon be a task for British paratroopers, about 2,500 of whom are expected to start arriving in early May, backed up with Apache attack helicopters. But the British commander in Laskhar Gah, Colonel Henry Worsley, said their principal role was to train and support the fledgling Afghan security forces. ''In a place like Garmser we might help mount a check post, put a soldierly look on it, and tell them how to defend it," he said.

Haji Karim Khan, 65, considered his family's educational history. Four decades ago, he graduated from Kabul University, he said. During the bloody Soviet occupation, just one of his sons completed secondary school.

Now his six grandsons may not even make it that far -- they have just been moved to the town of Goreshk since all four local schools closed down. The people of Helmand say the Karzai government has abandoned them, he said.

''You just hear a small item at the end of the news saying the situation in the southwest is bad these days. But that is not enough. They need to tell us what they are going to do," he said.