In her recent interview with Australian ABC News, young Afghan legal scholar “T” gives a horrifying account of small children dying at the gate of the Kabul airport after a weeklong holdup under a scorching sun. Before escaping to Australia back in August, T, together with faculty of Melbourne’s Monash University, ran an international webinar on peace and human rights from the Afghan city of Herat.
As we watch Taliban leaders move from caves to government offices, educational institutions throughout Afghanistan have fallen into a survival mode. They have taken down their websites and destroyed documents incompatible with Sharia law. Mohammad Ashraf Ghairat, the new chancellor of Kabul University installed by the Taliban, has referred to co-educational schools as “centers for prostitution.” In his first decree, Ghairat banned women from teaching or attending the university until a “real Islamic environment” was in place.
Short on cash, the Taliban announced that they were cutting government salaries by 50%. Lecturers outside Kabul whom I spoke with were not sure whether they would be paid at all. They added that segregation of classes by gender was unachievable due to scarcity of female instructors, a shortage of rooms, and a lack of money needed to double instruction hours. The Taliban’s interpretation of Sharia law also requires a woman to be accompanied by a male family member outside the home, which is impractical on a college campus. An engineering student from Kabul Polytechnic University told me that she and her fellow female students had not left home since the Taliban entered Kabul. Online remote learning was out of the question due to poor internet service and a lack of equipment on campuses and in students’ homes.
I also spoke with 25-year-old Hazara female researcher “H,” who was lucky to secure a foreign passport last year. The Hazaras have suffered a genocidal campaign by the Taliban. H was three months short of completing her advanced degree in biology in Malaysia when the Taliban discontinued financial support to all scholars studying abroad, paid monthly through Afghan embassies. Malaysia does not grant legal status to refugees. Left with no support, H does not know what to do. The frightening prospect of returning to Afghanistan keeps her up at night.
The median age of Afghans is 18.4 years old. Most of them went to schools and colleges during 20 years of the U.S.-led foreign presence. With the help of USAID, student enrollment grew from under one million male-only students in 2001 to 9.5 million students in 2020, with 40% of them female. Today, Afghan women feel betrayed by their men, who accepted the return of the Taliban and imposition of the most restrictive form of Sharia law with little or no resistance. They also feel betrayed by the United States, which did not see them as worth fighting for.
It is all politics, T said bitterly at the end of her interview. If they cared about us, she posited, they wouldn’t have handed Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Eugene M. Chudnovsky is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York and a co-chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists, http://concernedscientists.org/.
