In the last three decades, Afghanistan's educational system was steered with ample radicalization. Control of the education system has been a mobilizing force for the conservative and radicalized movement that led to overthrow of the Soviet government and the subsequent rise to power of the Taliban. During the reign of Taliban the educational system was inclined to produce Mujahedeen. Till date, Taliban diverge several Quranic verses for justifying killings of thousands of innocents, prohibiting women from acquiring education, labeling co-education illicit and the modern scientific inventions desecrated and the list goes on and on.

Recently Taliban have said that they supported education in Afghanistan given in a proper environment in line with Islamic instructions. "Most of the Taliban members are teachers. We have scholars (Ulema) who know the importance of education better than others. There will be no permission to education that diverts the Muslims from the real part of Islam. Parents should not enroll their children to schools funded by Christians," they warned.

Aiming to put Afghanistan on the course of endemic upheaval and turmoil, Taliban's advice will stand sufficient. It is evident that education can function as a root cause and feeder of conflict, with the potential to retrench ethnic/religious divides and other societal cleavages.

This dual nature of education reflects both the positive, or peace building and the negative, or conflict enhancing potential of education. A careful examination of the linkage between education conflict and peace building in Afghanistan demonstrates the ways in which education policy reforms have to deliberately be used creating the conditions for building a foundation for reconciliation and sustainable peace.

It is right for the world and us to worry about the impact of Afghanistan's dysfunctional educational system especially when it has been demonstrated that poorly educated young men in a country as large as Afghanistan pose a serious security threat to the rest of the world. Millions of families, especially those with little money, send their children to religious schools or madrassahs.

Many of these schools are the only opportunity available for education, but some have been used as nurturing ground for violent extremism. There is no doubt that madrassahs need to be reformed but what is even more critical is the reform of public sector educational systems.

It is timely for the world's donor agencies to offer help to Afghanistan to reform its system of education so that it can produce people who have the right kinds of skills to operate in the modern economy. In pursuit of this noble objective, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) vowed to provide Afghan government a grant of $52 million for the promotion of technical and vocational education. The best Afghan government can do is the fair and transparent use of the amount so that Afghan society could be dragged out of dismay.

There are several ways of assessing the status of an educational system in the developing world. Among the more frequently used indicators are adult literacy rates for both men and women in various parts of the country; enrollment rates for both girls and boys at different levels of education and in different areas of the country; the dropout rates at different levels of education; the number of years boys and girls spend in schools; the amount of resources committed to education as a proportion of the gross domestic product, particularly by the public sector; the amount of money spent on items other than paying for teachers' salaries; and, finally, some measures of the quality of education provided. However Afghanistan's record is very poor on all these counts which need immediate remedy.

In many societies including Afghanistan the opportunity cost of sending children to school is greater than the benefit education is likely to bring. Parents bear costs even when education is free. Perceived cost of education is likely to be more of an inhibiting factor for the attendance of girls in schools than for boys. In poor households, girls help their mothers handle a variety of chores including the care of their siblings. One way of approaching this problem is to provide monetary incentives to parents to send their children to school. School feeding programs fall into this category of assistance; they lower the cost of education for parents.

Afghanistan's spending on education is not enough seeing the magnitude of illiteracy. The remedy is to increase the proportion of public resources going into education. If tax-to-GDP ratio cannot be increased, the state should be willing to divert resources from sectors with lower priority towards education. The donor community has been prepared to help with funds when it is not feared that domestic resources were constrained to allow for an increase in public sector expenditure on education.

The quality of poor instruction should preliminarily be considered. The obvious solution is to invest in teacher training, reforming the curriculum and improving the quality of textbooks that should be deficient of religio-ethnic biases. The high quality and standard of books must be maintained on top priorities.

There may be poorly constructed or the buildings may be poorly maintained. The students may not even have chairs and desks where they can sit and work. This problem can be handled, once again, by committing more resources for public sector education. An autonomous Education Commission should be built whose members are nominated by the government with approval from the parliament that should be charged with preparation of new syllabus acquainted with latest developments in the world of science and technologies.

In order to increase girls' enrollment in schools, parents should be prepared to send their girls to school only if they don't have to travel long distances, if they are taught by female teachers, and if the schools have appropriate toilet facilities. In some situations parents would be prepared to educate girls if there were single-sex schools. The solution for this problem is to build more schools for girls and to employ more female teachers.

Afghanistan's educational system requires an almost total overhaul. In the modern world, economic growth and the spread of democracy have raised the value of education and increased the importance of ensuring that all children and adults have access to high quality and effective education.

Education promoting combined values is increasingly driven by a growing understanding of what works in education and how to go about successfully improving teaching and learning in schools with sufficient resource allocation. Pluralistic education plays an essential role in relation to conflict prevention, resolution, reconciliation and reconstruction. Under this rationale, education should be considered as a non-traditional tool for building security by linking education to the human security framework.