• History Wars: What Should We Teach the Cadets at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan?

In my capacity as Professor of Military History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, I spent the summer of 2005 in Kabul, Afghanistan developing curriculum for a new National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA).  While my mission was to oversee the translation of West Point techniques into Dari and the adoption of West Point methods by the Afghan faculty, my experience in Kabul turned out to be demonstration of the practical and philosophical objections of any simple translocation of American models to NMAA.             This paper will explore the historian’s role in, if not a meaningless “Global War on Terror,” a real struggle to give Western values a competitive position in the global market place of ideas.  Officer education at NMAA aims at more than technical skills.  For the future leaders of the Afghan National Army, the study of military history can be a means of internalizing a set of values about, for example, civil-military relations and the appropriate use of force, which can contribute to the evolution of a democratic Afghanistan.  Contrary to the expectations of West Point’s leaders, the appropriate curriculum is not obvious and will require choices between competing Western and traditional Afghan narratives.  One discovers in the progress the degree to which that “Afghan” narrative has already been shaped by competing influences from Iran, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union.             The paper will address both the implications of teaching various versions of the Crusades or the rise of the Taliban to young Afghans and some of the practical constraints hampering Western efforts to guide the Afghans in moving rapidly from an insular to a world class educational system.