Day 4 - Working with the CompSci Department

Woke up this morning and got Intel about another offensive. Seems the Taliban are stepping things up for the summer season. This time they staged an attack on Bagram Air Base. Based on the security posture here, a direct assault on a fortified base with many thousands of armed soldiers by 20 or so terrorists seems more than a bit futile, but it does make the international news, so I guess something is accomplished for their side.

For me it was a fairly nice, calm day. After the initial morning emails I headed over to the Computer Science department. I met for a time with the department deputy, LTC Haroon. We talked about the status of their programs, I got a teaching schedule from him, and then we toured the classrooms, labs, and popped into a few classes in session. I visited an introductory computing class where they were teaching Excel fundamentals. In the senior level database course they were covering normalization, data decomposition, and re-factoring. It looked pretty good the short time I was there. Finally we visited a junior level java programming class. They are only a few weeks into their "spring" term and the programs they were working on showed good progress. The semsters here are different than ours in the US. The spring term goes from now until some time in August and summer break is timed to coincide with Ramadan. Fall/Winter semester starts not long after Eid al-Fitr, the celebration at the end of Ramadan.

The Dean's number one priority here is faculty development. Much of my effort will be focused on working with the instructors and lab technicians to help improve their teaching and the student's learning. The CS department has a mix of Afghan military officers and contract civilians teaching. I found out from my chai with the Dean today that the contract civilians make a substantial amount more than their military counterparts. This leads to some un-spoken friction in the department, and seems to hurt the motivation of the military instructors. Hopefully we can find a way to work through all that and convince everyone that the cadet's learning should come first. This will be a challenge.

As I alluded to earlier, I had my first social call with the Dean today, Col Hamdallah. He is one of the eldest officers here, and based on the cultural tradition is given a great amount of respect regardless of his rank. It was interesting to learn that his son had just graduated from Westpoint with a Civil Engineering degree and is pursuing a Master's degree in Nebraska. In fact, one of our newly arrived team members from Westpoint had him as a student. More evidence of the smallness of our world.

One thing I'm going to pursue while I'm here is establishing an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) student chapter and perhaps find a way to send some of the instructors to SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) next year. We'll need to find sponsorship or get some kind of special support to make it happen. I did a cursory check of the dues for a student member of the ACM in Afghanistan and it is $18 per year. This does not seem like much to most of the people reading this blog, but it is a prohibitive amount to ask of one of the Afghan cadets. That much money can do so much more for their families during the rough years ahead. I hope we can find an alternative. ACM involvement will go a long way to helping faculty and student development.

Which leads me to my last topic for today's post. I thought hard about including it, but in the interest of fair and balanced blogging I realized I must. If one searches the open source press about the international involvement here all these numbers are available. The Afghan National Army (ANA) is currently at just over 100,000 soldiers. The US is currently contributing approximately 49% of the salaries for all the Army's soldiers each month. The planned goal is to have a well trained and well equipped standing Army here of about 171,000 soldiers. This has been determined to be the number required to provide a stable enough security environment to encourage foreign investment and economic development. The estimated cost to support a standing Army of this size is just over $12 billion per year. Yes, billion with a B. Now the shocking part. The GDP/GNP of Afghanistan right now stands between $800 million and $1 billion per year. I know GDP and GNP are different, but in Afghanistan's case they are currently one in the same since there are minimal or no foreign investments to make GNP greater than GDP.

The bottom line, we (you, me, the rest of the US tax payers, our children, and the rest of the international community) are going be helping the Afghan people for a long, long time. It is hard to meet them, work with them, and learn about their families and not be committed to helping. It is equally as hard to quantify how much help we should provide, but if the numbers above are remotely accurate, I hope and pray that in the long run it's all worth it. Freedom and liberty aren't free after all.