ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the contemporary history of educational politics in Afghanistan from the perspective of studies of conflict, nation-building and international intervention amidst the penetrated sovereignty of a failed state, focusing on the communist and Taleban regimes from 1978 to 2001, with briefer reference to periods before and since. Education policy was formulated in close collaboration with Soviet education and political advisers, to conform to Socialist objectives as well as adapting the education system to the Soviet model to facilitate collaboration in education and training. Like the Bolshevik predecessors of their former Soviet adversaries, who had originally claimed to engage in bourgeois diplomacy only with the express intention of undermining the capitalist system, the Taleban thus adopted an education policy designed to dismantle the existing educational apparatus.
