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WASHINGTON Consistent is not the adjective many would use to describe President Trumps national security policy. But there is one goal he has nurtured since the 2016 campaign: withdrawing all American troops from Afghanistan.

Now, in the waning days of his presidency, Mr. Trump is scrambling to make it so, aided by conservative antiwar forces who see it not only as good policy but also as a linchpin to any future he may seek in politics.

This week, Mr. Trump dismissed his defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, who had repeatedly expressed reluctance for a fast pullout from Afghanistan, replacing him with Christopher C. Miller, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who may lack the stature and experience to push back effectively on Mr. Trumps 11th-hour foreign policy actions.

Notably, Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel and fierce proponent of ending American involvement in Afghanistan, was named this week as a senior adviser to Mr. Miller.

Mr. Trump recently nominated a new ambassador to Afghanistan, William Ruger, the vice president for research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute a vocal and well-financed opponent of current conflicts abroad. Even before any Senate confirmation, which seems unlikely before Inauguration Day, Mr. Ruger maintains a large chair at Mr. Trumps foreign policy table.

The president has had difficulty finding personnel who would faithfully execute on his preferences, Mr. Ruger said in an interview on Friday. With the new Pentagon leadership, the president could really cement a legacy here, he said, adding that Mr. Trump could be the leader who ends Americas longest war.

This week, the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, traveled to Washington on a previously scheduled trip as officials in both countries braced for a possible announcement as early as next week to quickly reduce the 4,500 United States troops still left in Afghanistan. Mr. Trump has said previously that he wants to pull all troops from Afghanistan by Christmas.

With his recent flurry of firings and appointments, Mr. Trump has effectively pulled down a majority of the personnel guardrails against a fast withdrawal.

Mr. Trumps views on reducing the United States footprint overseas are long standing and a central component of his America First foreign policy agenda. After originally supporting the war in Iraq, he spent years criticizing President George W. Bush for Americas wars in the region. During his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump astonished fellow Republicans by directly attacking Mr. Bush about the war in Iraq and suggesting he failed to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But what many Republicans failed to grasp is that Mr. Trumps positions on the so-called endless wars were good politics. Rancor toward those conflicts has grown among many conservatives, including those in the Koch circle, as well as libertarians among congressional Republicans and even those on the left, including Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, among others.

Last year, VoteVets, the liberal political action committee, and the conservative Concerned Veterans for America teamed up to persuade Congress to revoke authorizations of military force passed after Sept. 11. Mr. Trump also replaced the hawkish John R. Bolton with Robert C. OBrien as his national security adviser. Mr. OBrien has said the United States needs to redirect its resources from Afghanistan and toward the competition and possible conflicts with China and Russia.

Polls have shown that a majority of veterans have grown disenchanted with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, which helped Mr. Trump earn strong support among veterans who voted in 2016. Many have been disappointed that troops remain deployed in Afghanistan and that other promises to reduce the military presence in other regions have not been fulfilled.

Exit polls this month suggest that Mr. Trump won veterans 54 percent to 44 percent; in 2016, the poll found he won veterans 60 percent to 34 percent, a major shift that could stem from a variety of factors including his mixed record on these issues.

Nov. 12, 2020, 7:30 p.m. ET

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will find himself having to address these political dynamics at home and the realities on the ground as progress toward peace between the Taliban and the Afghan government stalls.

Critics of a fast withdrawal before the Taliban meet the conditions of a recent peace agreement fear that any attempt to pull all American troops by years end would potentially result in deaths on the ground. Citing recent escalating violence across the country, they worry that the Taliban could succeed at seizing more territory, especially in the south, the groups historic center of power.

Its irresponsible to make troop reduction your entire political objective, said Evelyn N. Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense. If you withdraw irresponsibly, you put strategic objectives and military lives at risk.

Critics of an accelerated withdrawal point to logistical challenges of the strategy. Several current and former Pentagon officials have noted that a withdrawal within two months which seems to be Mr. Trumps goal would be challenging, given the amount of military equipment that would have to be shipped out to avoid becoming spoils for the Taliban.

Those in the Pentagon will use the logistics argument to slow this down, said Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America, a group that has strongly influenced veterans policies under Mr. Trump. People there have slow-walked this and tried to box the president in and that likely upset the president and did not endear Secretary Esper to him.

Over the last year, the organization has spent over $3 million on advertisements in support of an Afghanistan withdrawal. Conservative news media personalities, including Tucker Carlson, have also advocated the drawdown. If Mr. Trump actually announces an expedited plan, we are going to go big, Mr. Caldwell said.

Of course with Mr. Trump, strongly expressed intentions concerning troops often do not come to fruition.

After announcing a full troop withdrawal from Syria in late 2018 and abandoning Kurdish allies, for which he was widely criticized he opted to leave several hundred troops in Syria.

He has also told aides he wanted to greatly reduce the 700 American troops in Somalia most of them Special Operations forces and so far that has gone nowhere.

Mr. Ruger said the pressure would remain when Mr. Biden takes office.

Regardless of who the president is, we will support good policies, he said. Getting out of Afghanistan is good policy.

Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting from Kabul.

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Trump Pentagon Purge Could Accelerate His Goal to Pull Troops From Afghanistan - The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan Three U.S. presidents and 19 years later, it is President-elect Joseph R. Bidens turn to inherit the American war in Afghanistan. The question that is leaving Afghans hanging is just how quickly he will remove troops.

It is a desperately difficult time for Afghanistan. American troops, honoring President Trumps deal with the Taliban, are still on their way out of the country, despite the stalling of peace talks between the insurgency and the Afghan government, and a wave of intensified Taliban offensives near important cities.

Officials in Kabul are very aware that Americans are tired of the war a fact made clear by a near absence of the issue in presidential debates, and by Mr. Bidens seeming agreement with President Trumps desire to get out of Afghanistan.

It is past time to end the forever wars, which have cost the United States untold blood and treasure, Mr. Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year. As I have long argued, we should bring the vast majority of our troops home from the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East and narrowly define our mission as defeating al Qaeda and the Islamic State (or ISIS)."

Still, in Mr. Biden, Afghan officials said they hoped to gain a less capricious and more communicative ally, though they know he is unlikely to stop the troop withdrawal.

We understand theres not going to be U-turn on the U.S. side on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, said Nargis Nehan, a former minister of mines and petroleum under President Ashraf Ghani. But under the leadership of the Biden administration, we hope and believe that its going to be done with a much more responsible strategy in comparison to the Trump administration.

Both in Kabul and Washington, officials with knowledge of security briefings said there was fear that President Trump might try to accelerate an all-out troop withdrawal in his final days in office though the amount of American infrastructure still in the country would be physically impossible to remove by January, according to security officials.

A Pentagon shake-up in recent days, while President Trump has sought to contest his election loss, has cast more confusion on the issue. Security officials said that on Thursday, the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin S. Miller, was traveling to Washington for consultations.

A spokesman for the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan, Col. Sonny Leggett, denied that General Miller was going to Washington for consultations, saying instead that he was on preplanned travel.

American commanders, while careful not to contravene President Trump in public, have warned that it was vital to keep the withdrawal contingent on the Talibans keeping their pledges.

Afghan officials are also publicly urging Mr. Biden to better support the stalled peace talks in Qatar, which some Afghans felt were pushed too hard by the Trump administration without enough protections for them. On Monday, Afghanistans second vice president, Sarwar Danesh, called on the incoming Biden administration to conduct a review of the Afghan peace process and to put more pressure on the Taliban to negotiate fairly.

A decade ago, as vice president in the Obama administration, Mr. Biden was the in-house skeptic of the war, pushing against the huge troop surge in Afghanistan that began in 2009.

For years, U.S. policymakers and officials likened the task of building new government institutions and modern security forces in Afghanistan in the middle of a war to building an airplane midflight. In 2009, Mr. Biden sought a different approach: to focus on international terrorist threats in Afghanistan and little else.

I dont think he has his changed his mind much since then: to get out of Afghanistan, let Afghans govern themselves, but keep a light footprint in the form of counterterrorism, primarily to ensure U.S. national security interests, said Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense minister under Mr. Ghani.

That approach keeping a small number of troops in Afghanistan as a counterterrorism force to keep Al Qaeda and Islamic State loyalists in check has been urged by the Pentagon and some American lawmakers.

In the Feb. 29 agreement with the United States that started the troop withdrawal, the Taliban agreed to publicly separate itself from Al Qaeda which was under the Taliban governments protection when it launched the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to deny terrorist groups the use of Afghan territory as a haven. But the troop withdrawal has continued even though last month a Qaeda leader was killed in a Taliban-controlled district in the countrys east, and there has been no evidence of any decisive severing of ties between the groups.

Afghan officials and analysts say they hope Mr. Biden will proceed more cautiously, and not be as likely to leave Afghanistan at the mercy of the Taliban and meddling neighbor countries.

A commitment to defeating Al Qaeda and the Islamic State is something that is part of Afghanistans formula for long-term stability and serves an important role here, said Orzala Nemat, an independent researcher in Afghanistan. A symbolic presence of international military forces balances this very weak position that Afghanistan is in the region, surrounded by nuclear powers.

Mr. Biden knows Afghanistan, he has been here a dozen times as a senator and he has interacted with many Afghan leaders, said Mr. Asey, the former deputy defense minister.

Afghan officials were quick to note that Mr. Biden and President Ghani have long been friendly toward each other. But Mr. Asey said that Mr. Biden also had a history of tension with other important Afghan officials notably with former President Hamid Karzai, whom he told that Pakistan was 50 times more important to the United States than Afghanistan, and whom he lectured about corruption.

One way that Afghan officials hope Mr. Biden can make a difference is by simply taking their concerns seriously. Some Afghan officials said they felt bullied by Trump and American officials to accept terms with the Taliban they did not agree to, particularly on the mass release of Taliban prisoners.

Human rights activists said they were also concerned that the peace process included too few protections for women and ethnic and religious minorities. In that, they are hoping the American Vice President-elect, Kamala Harris, can be an important voice as well.

We hope she will be a strong advocate for Afghan women within the Biden administration, said Ms. Nehan, the former mining minister, of Ms. Harris. We felt abandoned by the Trump administration.

Whatever achievement in regards to womens rights we are talking about does not just belong to Afghan women, its a universal achievement that we all have our own part in and a responsibility in protecting them, she added.

While there are currently around 4,500 U.S. troops still in Afghanistan, Taliban officials have implied that the February deal would collapse if the incoming Biden administration prolongs the presence of American forces in the country, including any counterterrorism forces.

But for now the Taliban leadership will watch and wait, as their fighters keep up their offensives.

The United States has responded by increasing airstrikes in defense of Afghan forces. While permitted under the February deal, anything drastically more under a new administration, such as attacking Taliban behind their front lines, could nullify the agreement.

October was the deadliest month in Afghanistan for civilians since September 2019, according to data compiled by The New York Times. At least 212 civilians were killed.

In a statement, the Taliban called the U.S. election and its outcome an internal issue of the United States.

The Islamic Emirate would like to stress to the new American president-elect and future administration that implementation of the agreement is the most reasonable and effective tool for ending the conflict between both our countries, the statement said.

But Qari Mohammad Farooq, a Taliban shadow district governor in Jowzjan Province, laid it out plainly.

I heard that Joe Biden won, but none of them are good for us, Mr. Farooq said. For me it doesnt matter who won, but it is important that they must leave.

Reporting was contributed by Najim Fahim from Kabul, Taimoor Shah from Kandahar and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

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U.S. Troops Are Still Leaving, but Afghans Hope Biden Will Help - The New York Times

Christopher Miller, pictured on Sept. 24, became acting defense secretary after President Trump fired Mark Esper. Miller is perceived as more loyal to Trump than Esper. Joshua Roberts/Pool/Getty Images hide caption

Christopher Miller, pictured on Sept. 24, became acting defense secretary after President Trump fired Mark Esper. Miller is perceived as more loyal to Trump than Esper.

After a purge at the Pentagon, former national security officials are worried about the fallout if President Trump were to launch an unprovoked military action against Iran or make big changes in Afghanistan in his waning days in office.

That's in addition to the ways that President Trump's refusal to concede and to give President-elect Biden access to intelligence materials are already damaging national security.

"The scenario most national security people are worried about is a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities," says Kori Schake, who served on George W. Bush's National Security Council and also in senior posts at the Pentagon and the State Department. "Because the 'maximum pressure' campaign that has been the signature of Trump administration foreign policy has very little positive result."

Four senior officials at the Pentagon, including Defense Secretary Mark Esper, were fired or resigned on Monday and Tuesday. Trump loyalists took their place. Two senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security were forced to resign this week as well.

Speaking to Mary Louise Kelly on All Things Considered, Schake says "a number of serious national security people are really worried" that Trump's purge "is putting malleable people in place in order to end his administration with a bang."

Schake cautions that she's skeptical herself that an attack on Iran will happen, mainly because it would require coordination with U.S. allies who would oppose it.

Nicholas Burns, who worked in various jobs including under secretary of state for political affairs during the George W. Bush administration and on the National Security Council for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton, agrees that foreign policy experts are worried about a preemptive Iran strike.

Another fear in the national security community is a rapid withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan, he tells All Things Considered.

"President Trump might try to accelerate the Afghan peace talks, to end the war there, and therefore to withdraw the American military forces in such a way that would be disadvantageous to the Afghan government," Burns says. "I mean, the fear is that President Trump won't be tough minded enough in negotiating with the Taliban."

Top generals and civilians have argued that the situation is currently too volatile to leave Afghanistan quickly.

Both of those scenarios Iran and Afghanistan "would have a direct impact on our national security a year from now, two years from now, and certainly have an impact on President-elect Biden's team as they come in in early 2021," Burns says.

Listen to the full audio interview with Kori Schake and Nicholas Burns at the audio link above.

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Former National Security Officials Worry What Trump Could Do In Iran And Afghanistan - NPR

Americas large military presence in Afghanistan may be finally coming to an end after almost 20 years at war.

Decisions on when and how the U.S. will significantly reduce its presence will play out early next year, national security analysts say. Almost 800,000 U.S. troops have been deployed to Afghanistan over the last two decades, and more than 2,400 died fighting a war widely ignored by the American public.

Washington laid out the conditions for an exit in a February agreement with the Taliban. That agreement said all U.S. troops would be out in 18 months if the Taliban honored a commitment to fight terrorist groups, particularly Islamic State, and not to attack international forces.

We are likely to see the two alternatives that the U.S. is choosing between are: either a major reduction in the context of peace talks, or a major reduction without regard to what follows in its wake, Johnny Walsh, a senior expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace, said in an interview. I do not think there is a world where we spend many more years robustly engaged in Afghanistan.

Banaras Khan/AFP via Getty Images

Activists of the Jamiat Ulema-e Islam Nazryate party rally in Quetta on March 1, 2020 to celebrate the U.S.-Taliban troop-withdrawal accord and timetable.

Ending the roughly $1 trillion, two-decade war would be significant after the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan has been particularly durable: Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump both pledged to end the conflict and, so far, failed.

President-elect Joe Biden said he would maintain a small troop presence of about 2,000 in Afghanistan, likely special operations forces focused on counter-terrorism missions. As vice president in 2009, Biden unsuccessfully resisted military leaders push to deploy tens of thousands of U.S. troops to Afghanistan. That meant in 2010, there were about 100,000 U.S. troops in that country.

Biden will end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, which have cost us untold blood and treasure, according to his campaign website. As he has long argued, Biden will bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan and narrowly focus our mission on Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Trump, meanwhile, has laid the groundwork for an exit strategy as his and Bidens views intersect on Afghanistan. He called for an end to the era of endless wars, pushed for a drastic reduction to about 4,500 troops by the end of this month and has suggested all troops could come home by the end of the year. His national security adviser, Robert OBrien, however, insisted that there will still be 2,500 Americans there come January 2021.

We are effectively leaving, said Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. If its down to figures Ive seen like 2,000 to 2,500 by this spring, it wont matter because theyre so small that you cant sustain a meaningful combat support role.

Daily enemy-initiated attacks in Afghanistan were 50% higher from July to September compared with the previous quarter, according to the latest report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Attacks over the three-month period were also characterized as above seasonal norms by U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan. There were 2,561 civilian casualties, including 876 deaths and 1,685 injuries, during the period 43% more than the previous quarter, though 36% less than the same period in 2019.

There is a good chance that you can go down pretty low, perhaps to the low four-digits or high three-digits, and still be able to do some counterterrorism and to prevent the Taliban from comprehensively winning the war, Walsh said.

But there is a cost of every troop reduction, Walsh said. At some point the U.S. will lose the ability to rescue provincial capitals or help major operations. Smaller troop numbers mean counterterrorism would be less effective, with fewer capabilities, and you can train fewer Afghan security forces, he said.

Regardless of intent, there will be some challenging first six months to a year for the Biden administration because a potentially Republican-led Senate would make it hard for Biden to pursue his foreign policy agenda, Loren DeJonge Schulman an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), said during an event to address the national security future under a Biden administration.

Congress is already setting some restrictions for troop reductions in Afghanistan. The House defense authorization bill for fiscal 2021 (H.R. 6395) calls for the administration to submit interagency reports and certifications before drawdowns below troop levels of 8,000 and 4,000. The secretary of defense may waive the reporting requirement if it is vital to U.S. national security interests or necessary because of an imminent and extraordinary threat to military service personnel.

The Senate defense policy bill (S. 4049) warns that a precipitous withdrawal of troops without effective, countervailing efforts to secure gains in Afghanistan may allow violent extremist groups to regenerate, threatening the security of the Afghan people and creating a security vacuum that could destabilize the region and provide ample safe haven for extremist groups seeking to conduct external attacks.

Congress hasnt finished a compromise version of the annual defense policy legislation, but leaders expect to vote on the final version in early December.

President Barack Obama, who pledged to end the conflict, announced three troop surges in 2009 including an additional 30,000 personnel in December that brought the total to its high point of 100,000, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Obama said he would begin withdrawing those forces by 2011. He later decided to keep 9,800 troops in the country in 2015, reversing a vow to reduce the number to 1,000, the CRS reported. By the time Obama left office, about 8,400 troops were still deployed.

Trump was a long-time critic of the conflict before being elected in 2016. But in his first year he announced a new Afghanistan strategy that re-emphasized the U.S. commitment and provided no firm timeline for a withdrawal.

My original instinct was to pull out and, historically, I like following my instincts. But all my life Ive heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office, Trump said in an address on the strategy in August 2017.

The Pentagon is on track to have 4,500 troops in Afghanistan by the end of November, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Rob Lodewick said in an emailed statement.

But Lodewick said the military wouldnt speculate on future troop numbers or timelines, including Trumps tweet saying troops could leave by Christmas, because any additional drawdown will be based on conditions in the country.

The Department of Defense continues prudent planning to achieve the commander-in-chiefs intent of ending the war in a responsible manner that protects our forces, aligns with our coalition partners and secures U.S. interests, Lodewick wrote. The biggest condition currently impacting the peace process is the level of violence perpetuated by the Taliban.

The U.S.-Taliban agreement signed in February stipulates that the full withdrawal of U.S. forces in May 2021 is dependent on reduced violence. Gen. Scott Miller, the top commander in Afghanistan, recently warned that Taliban attacks could derail the peace talks.

This is not a blind or blanket commitment and remains contingent upon the Taliban upholding their own commitments to the agreement, Lodewick wrote.

The U.S. spends $5 billion a year just to keep civil society functioning, in Afghanistan, said Jason Dempsey, an adjunct senior fellow at CNAS. We do need a reset. Weve gone four years with no real strategy at all.

Congress appropriated about $978 billion, or an average of $49 billion annually, for the war in Afghanistan from fiscal 2001 though fiscal 2020, Brown University tallies of war costs have found.

Historically, troop levels in Afghanistan and the contracting dollars spent to support them are highly correlated, a BGOV analysis shows.

Each U.S. soldier, sailor, airman and Marine in Afghanistan generates about $184,000 in annual defense contract costs, principally for a variety of support services, according to the analysis. Any drop in contract spending is likely to lag behind the fall in troop numbers by several months. Some of the decline may be offset by increased spending to support Afghan forces as they adapt to fighting with less U.S. involvement.

To contact the reporters on this story: Roxana Tiron in Washington at rtiron@bgov.com; Travis J. Tritten at ttritten@bgov.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Robin Meszoly at rmeszoly@bgov.com

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An End to the $1 Trillion War in Afghanistan May Be on Horizon - Bloomberg Government

LONDON, Nov 12 2020 (IPS) - As if four decades of war were not enough, then came the pandemic.

For each of the past five years, Afghanistan has been identified by the United Nations as the worlds deadliest country for children and, despite progress made in peace talks between the government and the Taliban, child and youth casualties from the ongoing conflict continue to mount in 2020.

Education itself has come under fire, with hundreds of attacks on schools and teachers. A 2018 joint report by the Afghanistan Ministry of Education and UNICEF, estimated that as many as 3.7 million children in Afghanistan were out of school, 60 per cent of them girls.

Against this backdrop, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) the global fund launched at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit to deliver quality education for vulnerable children and youth in countries affected by armed conflicts, forced displacement, climate-induced disasters and protracted crises selected Afghanistan as one of the first countries to roll out a Multi-Year Resilience Programme (MYRP). The in-country Steering Committee formed to oversee implementation of the programme appointed management of the MYRP to UNICEF as a grantee.

Sarthak Pal, ECW project coordinator for UNICEF in Kabul, says Afghanistans MYRP was designed to focus on out of school children, by setting up community-based education (CBE) classes close to where they live. Classes are arranged mostly in private homes and sometimes in mosques for those who cannot make the long journey to the nearest school.

Most of these out of school children live in remote, rural and hard to reach places, Pal told IPS from Kabul. Pal explained that focusing on out of school children was a context-specific choice for Afghanistan, and may differ from MYRPs in other countries with their own unique contexts.

Watch video Keeping education alive in Afghanistan

The first year of the MYRP with teaching starting in May 2019 saw some 3,600 classes established in nine of Afghanistans 34 provinces. This required newly recruited teachers, 46 per cent of whom are women, to teach 122,000 children. Nearly 60 per cent of the enrolled children are girls.

When Education Cannot Wait came to Afghanistan in 2018 there were 3.7 million out of school children. These were the children and youth left furthest behind. Today, results from our multi-year resilience investment in Afghanistan are among the most promising in our global investment portfolio, especially for girls access to education now reaching the target of 60 percent of our investment. This shows how we can achieve education outcomes for the most marginalized children and youth in complex crisis settings by bringing together humanitarian and development actors under the leadership of the Ministry of Education. The children and youth of Afghanistan, the Afghan girls, deserve no less, said the ECW Director, Yasmine Sherif.

One new pupil in the classes is Khalid*, an eight-year-old boy with a permanent foot disability, who was displaced by conflict from Afghanistans Kunar province to Nangarhar province. Previously deprived of education by war and poverty, Khalid now attends a CBE class with access to free education and books. His teacher praises his enthusiasm and creativity and says Khalid has gone from being illiterate to learning how to read, write and draw.

The closest school is 4 kilometres away from where Khalid lives, too far for him to go, but now he has a classroom just 300 metres from his home. Both Khalids life, and the life of his family, have been transformed.

Khalids nine-year-old sister Hosna is able to attend an all-girls government school close-by. In the evening, Khalid and I study together at home and help each other in our lessons, she says, expressing how astonished she was by Khalids rapid improvement and capabilities. Khalid is so intellectually improved and motivated.

Bringing education closer to home helps secure the backing of both the community and the shuras (school councils), and is particularly effective in addressing barriers to girls education, such as long distances, a lack of female teachers and safety concerns. The role of School Management Shuras, or councils, has been important in building a sense of community ownership, although there are barriers to girls participation remains in some provinces.

ECW classes also reach children in camps set up for those displaced by conflict. Feizia Salahuddin quietly recounts in an IPS video how three of her siblings were killed. The 12-year-old girl also lost her mother. We face so many hardships here, she says. But then a smile appears when she describes going to ECW-supported CBE classes in Herat. I love to study. It makes me happy, she says.

An additional hammer blow to education this year came not from bombs or landmines but COVID-19. The government ordered all schools closed in March 2020, and CBE classes could only start reopening recently. Children affected by the impact of COVID-19 school closures now also faced increased vulnerability to recruitment by parties to the conflict, particularly boys. The crisis also exacerbated existing vulnerabilities of girls to child marriage and teenage pregnancy.

Dave Mariano, Head of Communications for Afghanistan for Save the Children International, an implementing partner for ECW, said the government had initially decided CBE classes could continue, but subsequently said teaching would have to continue via radio, television and internet, to which millions of children do not have access. Fortunately, classes eventually started to reopen with appropriate COVID-19 safety measures.

The reopening of CBEs required a lot of coordination to ensure that necessary provisions were in place to safely reopen, such as the availability of PPE, sanitisers, and even general public awareness on how to mitigate COVID risks through basic hygiene and other practices, Mariano told IPS.

Despite the challenges, UNICEF is already looking ahead to extend the MYRP, supported in this goal by the Ministry of Education and donors. Sweden is the largest in-country donor in Afghanistan, closely followed by Switzerland. However, UNICEF says the MYRP remains grossly under-funded with a 70 per cent funding gap across three years.

We are advocating that three years of MYRP is not enough. The primary school cycle in Afghanistan is six years. We cant leave the children half-way through. That is our main advocacy agenda now, said Pal.

ECW has given priority in Afghanistan to improving education for girls with a focus on female teacher recruitment. This is being achieved in Herat, where 97 per cent of teachers are women and 83 per cent of students in accelerated learning classes are girls.

For girls like Feizia Salahuddin, this means a chance to start rebuilding lives shattered by conflict and displacement, giving a sense that through a classroom and her textbooks, she is once more part of a community.

I get nervous when I get called to the blackboard, but my teachers and classmates support me, Feizia says. That is why I like them. They cooperate with me and teach me.

*Names have been changed in accordance with child safeguarding and communications policies.

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Despite Conflict and COVID-19, Children Still Dream to Continue Their Education in Afghanistan - Afghanistan - ReliefWeb