With conditions in Afghanistan so difficult for academics, the thought of going abroad for master’s or doctoral study has become enormously attractive.
Shortly after their takeover of the country in August 2021, the Taliban cut university lecturers’ salaries by 40 per cent, prompting many to leave the country. After that, female education was restricted – prompting further emigration by families with daughters – and there is still no sign that the ban on women studying for degrees will be lifted despite the resignations of more than 100 university lecturers in protest at the ban. Some of those lecturers remain unemployed, some started their own small businesses and some have also left the country.
Many of the academics who remain in Afghanistan would like to pursue higher-level study abroad to improve their skills and to experience new cultures. However, there are two problems. The first is that many opportunities for university lecturers to learn abroad – via national scholarship schemes and other formalised arrangements – have disappeared since 2021 because other countries do not want to deal with the Taliban.
Some Afghan academics have found their way on to master’s and doctoral courses at international universities anyway through their own personal efforts. But now the Taliban has begun refusing permission for academics to take up such opportunities. The country’s supreme leader, Mullah Haibatullah, proclaims that no university lecturers are allowed abroad for education, training or any other reasons unless they have written permission from his office.
After this order, even university lecturers who have won prestigious foreign scholarships – some of whom have waited two or three years for the enrolment and visa processes to run their course – are not allowed to take them up. If they do so, they risk being fired. Under previous regulations, the salaries of lecturers who went abroad for master’s or doctoral studies were still paid on time, and they resumed their lecturing positions after their return to Afghanistan.
This new restriction adds to the list of reasons for which Afghan academics can be fired by the Taliban. Many others have already been dismissed for membership of organisations and political groups, on both the left and the right, of which the Taliban disapproves. Now academics feel their freedom further diminishing.
I talked with some of the lecturers affected by the new restrictions. They are very depressed about the destruction of their dreams. When they were younger, many of them had had lots of other professional opportunities but had chosen to become university teachers to serve the country and the community in the best way they knew how. They saw education as the foundation of a civilised and modern Afghanistan, and they wanted to pursue higher studies abroad both to better themselves and to enhance their ability to contribute to Afghanistan’s development. Many are now regretting their choice of profession.
One lecturer, who was afraid to mention his name, told me that when he won a prestigious scholarship offered by a European country, he was expecting his faculty dean to praise him for his achievement. “But things happened totally differently,” he told me. “When I shared with him this news, he declined to assist me and told me that if I went I would lose not only my salary but also my position.” When he appealed to the university’s chancellor, a mullah, he received the same response.
Another lecturer at a public university told me that he was part of a group of 20 university lecturers who had repeatedly but unsuccessfully asked the Ministry of Higher Education to give them an appointment with Mullah Nida Mohammad, the current minister, to discuss their requests to study abroad. He said that most of these lecturers were in two minds about whether to leave their positions or pass up the golden learning opportunities that their long efforts to win foreign scholarships had yielded.
If those lecturers go abroad anyway, they will probably have to stay there. And that would be yet another blow to Afghanistan’s demoralised and depopulated universities.
The author is based in Afghanistan and, for safety reasons, has asked to remain anonymous.
