Iraq and Afghanistan

Recent reports are that the United States and the Kurdish enclave have developed a plan for an "American University" modeled on that in Beirut. Instruction will be in English. It is to be located near Sulaimaniya in eastern Kurdistan. There seems to be initial funding and the land has been staked out. The report suggests that many feel that such a university should be in Baghdad, where most of higher education is now located. But the developers of this idea think Baghdad is just too dangerous. Yet this should not be a consideration since we are talking about a project that will not mature for a few years..

There are several problems with the idea. First, although the aspiration is to create a major "Iraqi" university, the funding and support is Kurdish and American, which is fine only if it is to be a Kurdish institution. The plan mixes grand rhetoric with minor ambitions. The first students are expected to be a handful of Kurds, and they will not arrive for several years. There are projected to be 1000 students by 2011. In comparison, Baghdad University has (on paper at least) 70,000 students, and even Sulaimaniya University has 12,000. The American embassy believes there are 475,000 Iraqis pursuing higher education at the moment. The diplomats may be smoking something, but this gives some idea of the scale. Secondly, the intellectual and political figures supporting the project, Iraqi and American, are primarily those who supported the invasion -- likely not to be popular group for Iraq's next generation.

On December 12, I posted the idea of creating a major Iraqi University near Baghdad in the tradition of Jundi-Shapur and the Bayt-al-Hikmah of the Middle Ages. The concept was for a secular university that both Iran and Iraq could take pride in, binding the nations together in a positive manner that would avoid the sectarian struggles of the day. Obviously, this too is not something that will happen tomorrow. But it could be a major project for the future. The project for a new English language university in Kurdistan is an interesting one, but would see these as more complimentary than competing ideas.