Pakistan has nuclear bombs - and 80 million illiterates

The Telegraph has produced a very worrying article about illiteracy, corruption and a failed education system in Pakistan:

"About half of all the nation's adult men and two-thirds of women are illiterate, even though the authorities have set a notably low bar for judging literacy: the ability to sign one's own name. In a country that deploys nuclear weapons, most adults cannot even manage this elementary task."

What is worse is that Pakistan's education failure puts it below such paragons of good government as Zimbabwe and the Congo (where nearly 70% are literate despite a basket case of a government and decades of civil war). So is it any surprise that parents - desperate to get some education for their children, to give them some hope - turn to the religious schools, to the Taliban?

The failure of Pakistani politics, the corruption of its administration have failed ordinary Pakistani children. Yet the leadership remains complacent:

"Mohammed Aslam Kambo serves as the state secretary for schools in Punjab. Polite and businesslike, he holds court in a spotless, air-conditioned office in Lahore, surrounded by deferential functionaries. He is anxious to deny the existence of any serious problem. 'In Punjab, we don't have ghost schools. I'm sure there's not a single one,' he airily assured me a day before I visited the husk of the school in Gharayband. 'We have a sufficient level of primary schools,' he added. 'It's next to impossible that you will find a population of 100 houses and no state school.' "

There is a task for us in the west to tell Pakistan to sort out its schools - and I would suggest that the huge Pakistani diaspora across Europe, the Middle East and America have a big role to play in getting change in the country of their fathers.