A funny thing happened on the way to writing this week’s article. My two nieces dropped in for a visit, and I gave them the child’s version of Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea, which they found both interesting and inspiring, not always an easy accomplishment with the sandbox set.

This morning, I was reading Nicholas D. Kristoff’s column, “More Schools, Not Troops.” I knew I had promised to pursue Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of a Nation, treating The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling In America, which set me to thinking: Is it more important to address our school problem or whether or not to send thousands more of our youth to be slaughtered in this second tragedy of Vietnam? I decided on the latter, for those who missed it in “The New York Times OP-ED, October 29, 2009, in the hope that if enough of us speak out, the young people facing danger on our streets may not end up in greater danger on foreign soil.

Kristoff begins by asserting that for the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there. For the cost of 40,000 troops over a few years, we could just about turn every Afghan into a Ph.D.

Already, Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, has now built 39 schools in Afghanistan and 92 in Pakistan, and not one has been burned down or closed. The Afghan Institute of Learning has built 32 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with none closed by the Taliban, though three schools have been closed by the local communities for security reasons.

The TV news and press have been rife with reports about Matthew P. Holt, an American military veteran, and the top civilian officer in Zabul Province, who resigned over our Afghan policy. As Kristoff quoted from the “Washington Post,” Mr. Holt has said ‘Our military presence in Afghanistan is responsible for increasing the presence of the insurgency, not quelling it.”

In the same issue of “The New York Times,” the OP-ED piece Transcripts of Defeat by Victor Sebestyen reveals how Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev had explained to his Soviet commander the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul:

“There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless, much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain control over the territory we seize.

“Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.”

Sebestyen goes on to tell us that at the time of this meeting, the Soviet forces were in the seventh- year of their nine-year war. Akhromeyev went on to request more men and equipment, saying without them, the war would last for a long, long time.

These words are of particular warning to our generals:

“Marshal Akhomeyev, a hero of the Leningrad Siege in World War II, was trying to explain why a force of nearly 110,000 well-equipped soldiers from one of the world’s two great superpowers, was appearing to be humiliated by bands of “terrorists.”

Recently, a father from the Marines left his wife and three little girls for Afghanistan. The two-year-old wept with the others, and begged him, “Don’t die, Daddy.”

Are you listening, President Obama? Really listening? Are you weeping with that little family? Or are you listening to the hawks, the Pentagon, the generals and the manufacturers of toys of war, more concerned with how history will judge you and your administration than our people living on Main Street today?

Are you praying, Mr. President, with us, and for us, for our country? And our dads and moms so far from home?

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