National Geographic: Struggle for the soul of Pakistan

[Democrats_win]

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0709/pakistan/pakistan.html


Pervez Hoodbhoy lives every day with the consequences of the lack of public education in Pakistan. An MIT-trained professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, he was speaking to a graduate-level class in physics a few days after the huge earthquake that devastated Kashmir in 2005, describing the geophysical forces that produced the disaster. "When I finished, hands shot up all over the room," he recalls. "'Professor, you are wrong,' my students said. 'That earthquake was the wrath of God.' "

This, he says, is the legacy of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose education ministry issued guidelines on bringing an Islamic perspective to science and other subjects in the public schools. "The Zia Generation has come of age," he says. "It isn't Islamic to teach that earthquakes are caused by the movement of tectonic plates. Instead, you are supposed to say, by the will of Allah, an earthquake happens." Today a government commission is working to modernize education, but "it goes deeper than updating textbooks," he says. "It's a matter of changing society."
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This is a comprehensive article about Pakistan. I hope that the Democratic candidates read it. They'll not only learn the name of the leader of Pakistan, they'll learn who Zia-ul-Haq was and they'll learn that the Taliban is filling the vacuum where Pakistan is failing to provide security--much like what happened in Afghanistan in the late 90s.