Why this all matters

I've been reading Fulbright applications this week. Nearly 1000 Afghans have applied for grants to sponsor their master's degree studies in the United States. Probably about fifty will eventually win scholarships, in fields from architecture and urban planning to financial accounting to filmmaking. These candidates are, by and large, pretty talented. They mostly come from the top of their classes at universities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or India; they mostly have responsible positions in government, NGOs, and foreign embassies and international organizations; their English is good (often excellent) and they speak Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, French, German, Arabic, Turkish and who knows what else besides.

Yet it's not their academic qualifications that are so compelling or even their oft-repeated promises of service to their homeland. It's their personal stories. This generation spent its school age years in the Afghan civil war and under Taliban rule, or as refugees in Pakistan (mostly) or Iran. Their stories are of girls who studied secretly; of fathers who were shot by the Taliban for educating their daughters; of refugee families building their own houses out of mud in Pakistan. Twelve year old boys who sold fruit from carts while doing their homework, so their families could pay rent and school fees, in asylum countries that didn't allow Afghan refugees access to public schools. Mothers who spent half their tiny salaries on books and pens. Their personal statements weigh you down with sheer repetition of hardship and of courage.

What we do here matters. The modest contribution of the Fulbright student program in Afghanistan, which probably costs in all less than a couple of companies of American soldiers, is a bridge to a better future. Young Afghans know what religious despotism and terrorism are; they want no more of it. They ask for our help now, but don't expect it forever.

I for one am glad to stand with the teenager whose volleyball game was attacked as un-Islamic by Taliban thugs with rifles and who now is a journalist, with the 17 year old who was brave enough to interpret for American troops in 2002 and now helps lead an international organization's local office in his home town, and with the girl whose school was conducted in secret, but who will not give up until she is the governor of her province. What we do to support them, what we do to help them succeed: it matters.