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But experience has taught him not to count on the good times lasting long.

Over just 12 years, Abdul Aziz, 50, has seen at least two anti-education governments come and go. He opens his school's doors when the local politics allow it, but with all the volatility he cannot attract good teachers or even wheedle the provincial education department to send him enough books. His school is cold in winter, scorching in summer and ill-supplied year round, but at least it is open.

"When the Taliban came to power in the 1990s we lost a lot of students and a lot people left Marja," he said. "Then in 2002 after the Taliban fled, people came back and the schools reopened until the Taliban came back again in 2006, and then the schools closed. Then we reopened in 2010 when the Marines came."

His school stands as an example of how the American troop surge in Helmand Province improved people's lives in places like Marja, once a stronghold of the Taliban. It also, however, shows the limitations of what can be achieved in rural southern Afghanistan, even with the West's vast resources at work.

A combination of insecurity, logistical hang-ups and corruption most often keeps the schools that do manage to open their doors from being adequately equipped or organized, and many parents are still wary of sending their children to them.

"This is not only the story of Marja — this is the story of all of rural Helmand," said Nasima Niazi, a member of Parliament from Helmand, who taught for years in the province's schools before she ran for office.

Still, there are now 140,000 children registered in the province's schools, according to the provincial education department, which is an astonishing number given that in 2002, when Ms. Niazi started teaching again, there were just 75 students in the high school in Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital.

The situation in Marja is counted as a success, too, though a tenuous one. With 9 out of 15 schools open and 5,000 children attending class, there is no comparison to three years ago. But families here are always ready to pull their children out of class because of ingrained fear of reprisal from the Taliban. That fear lives on despite an effort by some Taliban to improve their image by allowing boys' schools to stay open in several areas of Helmand, said Mohammed Nasim Safi, the head of the provincial education department.

Often, now the barrier is the entrenched anti-education biases among the rural population, Mr. Safi said. Helmand, which is steeped in conservative Pashtun culture, has among the lowest literacy rates in the country with 8 percent of men and far fewer women able to read in contrast to a 43 percent literacy rate for men nationwide, according to rough statistics used by the American military in Helmand.

"Most of the closed schools are either in the areas where the government presence is zero or in areas where people are not interested in education and sending their children to school," he said, noting that of the 336 schools in the province, 185 are open.

State-run education in rural Afghanistan has had a troubled history after a slow and cautious start in the 1950s under the rule of Prime Minister Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan and Mohammad Zahir Shah, the former king. When the Communists came to power in 1978, they aggressively pushed an education campaign that aroused the wrath not only of country dwellers, but of the mujahedeen, who saw state education as an anti-Islamic, foreign import.

The mujahedeen burned thousands of schools in the 1980s and early 1990s and killed thousands of teachers, according to a report on the development of the Taliban's education policy by the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a research group in Kabul.

When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they violently discouraged both boys and girls from attending school. In 2001, after the invasion by American and allied forces, a renewed emphasis on education again met with derision from rural Afghans, but slowly that has changed. Many parents now desperately want their children to learn to read and write and do math so that they can better help support the family.