I'm not a big fan of the United Nations, but in Afghanistan, UNICEF is doing the right thing.
When the Taliban swept to power in the mid-1990s, women were barred from working and encouraged to remain indoors at all times. Girls were forbidden education, and hundreds of schools shut down countrywide....
Nowadays, Afghanistan's schools are overflowing. New students arrive on Zarghuna's doorstep every morning. "Poor families, rich families, everyone is sending their girls to us," explains Zarghuna's principal, Alia Hafezee. "It's like everyone woke up and realized their children can't make their lives better without knowledge."
The number of new arrivals at schools countrywide shocked the international aid community...Based on 1996 enrollment figures of 900,000 students countrywide, UNICEF prepared 1.2 million back-to-school packs consisting of notebooks, pencils, erasers, and other necessities. Current enrollment, split equally between boys and girls in the urban areas, is estimated at 3 to 3.2 million, with tens of thousands more waiting to start classes in September.
We can thank George W. Bush as well, for being the first U.S. president, as Christopher Hitchens put it, to "bomb a country out of the stone age".