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Karzai seeks help to build schools

KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghanistan needs more international help to build Islamic schools so fewer students will attend more radical ones outside the country, President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday.

Karzai said parents would not know what their children study in Islamic schools or madrassas outside the country - an apparent reference to neighboring Pakistan, with whom relations have been prickly.

"I wish all international communities, especially Islamic countries, would help us in constructing madrassas," Karzai said at an education conference. He did not specify countries. "Our students should be inside our country under the control of our religious scholars and clerics.".

About 91,000 Afghan pupils - less than 2 percent of the country's 5.8-million students - attend 336 madrassas nationwide.

The U.S. military has built two facilities and is building five more in east Afghanistan called centers for educational excellence - though some Afghans would call them madrassas - said Lt. Col. David Accetta. The boarding schools offer a balanced curriculum that includes religious studies, "not what you would expect, I think, if you called it a madrassa," he said. "A madrassa in most people's minds is a school where there is extremist religious education, and that's not what we're doing."

Taliban kidnap Afghans, Arabs

Taliban militants detained 20 Arabs and Afghans who were hunting rare birds in Afghanistan's Farah province and robbed them of their money, weapons and personal belongings, deputy provincial governor Younis Rassouli said Tuesday. Four Afghans and two Qataris were still being held Tuesday. Meanwhile, a suicide car bomber detonated his explosives next to a NATO convoy, wounding a soldier.

[Last modified February 13, 2008, 01:43:11]