Do many people understand arabic in Afghanistan?

My husband is in the army and he wants to learn arabic and farsi. Which one do you think he should focus on more? I think arabic is more widely used than farsi, but recently more people get deployed to Afghanistan than Iraq, so if he were to go there do you think knowing some arabic would help him out?
Additional Details
What I mean to ask is whether arabic is thaught there as a foreign language in schools and whether people speak it as a foreign language? I know it's not official there.

Susan

For Afghanistan, definitely Pashto and Farsi would be more useful to learn.

For Iraq it would be Arabic, but Farsi is understood and spoken by some shi'a.

You have to understand that Muslim education is very different to education here. Children who go to school (and many don't) will have to memorise the Qur'an, and religious education is at the centre of what they learn. So they learn the Qur'an and it's in Arabic - but they don't go through the actual formal process of learning the Arabic language as a spoken language as we would here. Arabic is a means to a religious end for them. They wouldn't speak it themselves, they would simply recite it parrot fashion.

JScott

Arabic isn't spoken in any region of Afghanistan. There are a crapload of different languages spoken throughout the country but I believe the two main ones are Farsi and Pashto.

jeff

The general population doesnt understand arabic at all in afghanistan. Its a foreign language. Infact only 15% of Muslim population speak Arabic and the rest don't. They speak their own language. But two langauges ie farsi and Urdu use Arabic alphabet, Turkish language used to use Arabic alphabet but they have changed it to Latin alphabet back in 1945.
But arabic greetings like Salam, Alhamdu, InshaAllah are widely used.

Jimmy P

Very few people in Afghanistan speak Arabic, The official language of that country is Pashtu but it does have a lot of Arabic roots so learning that language will help with a lot of basic words when trying to communicate with the locals.

Learning Farsi would help with the communication of some non-local workers who travel from other locations to work with the military in Afghanistan since very few of them speak Pashtu.

Bubba

neither, in Afghanistan they speak a different branch of Persian, Dari Persian, Pashto is also widely spoken. Farsi is a different branch of Persian. Arabic and Persian are completely different languages, Arabic isn't spoken in any countries that are even bordering Afghanistan, let alone in Afghanistan.

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