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Background: Against a backdrop of more than four decades of war, conflict and insecurity, Afghanistan is recognised as suffering from endemic violence and children are exposed to multiple forms of violence, including at the family and school levels. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of school-based peace education and a community-based intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence in conflict resolution, implemented in Afghanistan with the aim of reducing violence against and between children. Methods: The evaluation consisted of a cross-sectional, interrupted time series design with three data collection points over 12 months. Data was collected from students in 11 secondary schools (seven girls’ and four boys’ schools) in Jawzjan province of Afghanistan, with a total of 361 boys and 373 girls sampled at endline. All children were interviewed with a questionnaire developed for the study. Key outcomes included children’s experience of peer violence (both perpetration and victimization) at school, corporal punishment both at home and at school, and observation of family violence. Other outcomes included children’s gender equitable attitudes, attitudes towards child punishment, depression and school performance. Results: Between baseline and endline evaluation points, there were significant reductions in various forms of violence at the school level, including both boys’ and girls’ past month experience of peer violence victimization, peer violence perpetration, and corporal punishment by teachers. There were also significant reductions in boys’ and girls’ experience of corporal punishment at home and observation of family violence, with a particularly strong effect observed among girls. Both boys and girls had significantly more equitable gender attitudes and significantly less violence-supportive attitudes in relation to children’s punishment, and significantly fewer symptoms of depression. Girls’ school attendance was also significantly higher at endline. Discussion: To our knowledge this is the first time that a peace education program has been evaluated in Afghanistan, with or without a community intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence for conflict resolution. The evaluation suggests that the intervention may have led to a reduction in various forms of violence, including children’s peer violence, corporal punishment of children both at school and at home, and in children’s reports of domestic violence against women at the household level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role did North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the coalition (International Security Assistance Force—ISAF) it led play in the failure of the West in Afghanistan? This essay argues that the ISAF intelligence community's inability to come to grips with the complex operational environment in Afghanistan contributed to the problem. Using three concepts from the complexity literature, requisite variety, learning, and enactment, I analyze critical flaws in NATO's approach. ISAF's weak cross-cultural competence, its inconsistent relationships with international civilian organizations, and its absence of double- and triple-loop learning are identified as key drivers of NATO's weak intelligence performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on original sources, the paper gives a brief account of how the development of literacy and learning served first the legitimisation and then the conflict of powers within the Pashtun tribal society in the times preceding the foundation of the first Afghan state in 1747. The author discusses two main zones of social and political conflicts: between competing religious communities headed by tribal spiritual authorities, on the one hand, and between spiritual leaders and tribal military-administrative rulers, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]