OTTAWA - Canada plans to build as many as 50 schools in Kandahar province over the next few years, but is hedging on whether it supports a controversial Afghan program to construct a handful of madrassas -- schools of Islamic education.
Canadian officials on the ground -- both civilian and military -- have been quietly pushing Ottawa over the last year to encourage the development of moderate madrassas as long-term strategy to fight extremism.
However Arif Lalani, the Canadian ambassador in Kabul, would only say that the bulk of Ottawa's $60 million contribution toward building the Afghan education system will go to secular, public schools.
"What we will be focusing on in terms of our funding and our programing is going to be the building of the community schools, the type of which we just started building in Kandahar,'' Lalani said Thursday in a teleconference from Kabul.
Last year, Afghanistan's Education Ministry drew up plans for a $890,000 pilot program for a 16-classroom madrassa, with a dormitory for 300 students, to be located in the vicinity of Kandahar.
Unlike madrassas in northern Pakistan, which Western countries see as breeding grounds for fire-breathing extremism, the Afghan model is based on Hanafi, a less fundamentalist form of Islam.
President Hamid Karzai's government wants to establish as many as four regional religious schools. One of the schools -- in the eastern portion of the war-torn country -- opened last fall to mixed reviews and some skepticism among Afghans, who questioned whether the instruction was strict enough and could compete with what's offered just across the border.
The country's education minister, Hanif Atmar, is committed to the madrassa program and was quoted recently as saying the marginalization of religious schools in recent decades allowed extremism to flourish.
The government is struggling to reform the curriculum for the religious schools. Aside from meeting resistance among conservative mullahs, Atmar has faced a lack of resources.
Last fall, Canada announced it would contribute $60 million over four years through the World Bank toward the Afghan education system. In Kandahar, Ottawa has set aside $3.5 million specifically for the school construction program.
Afghan madrassas devote 40 per cent of class time to subjects connected to the Islamic faith. The rest is taken up with traditional subjects -- history, geography, science, language studies and computers.
Many parents, especially those in the parched swath of farmland west of Kandahar, are conservative Muslims and want their children raised with some form of religious education.
With no Afghan alternative, they've been forced to send to madrassas in Pakistan, many of which are Saudi-financed and teach Wahhabism, a stern and rigid form of Islam.
Some children return to Afghanistan radicalized.
Despite that, there is no indication the Canadian International Development Agency has earmarked any of the $3.5 million in education spending for Kandahar toward moderate religious education.
Lalani would only say that Canada, along the United Nations and other countries, are helping the Afghans develop the education system.
