Kabul, Afghanistan
At 6,000 feet above sea level in the jagged remains of what was once a thriving city lies one of the most pitiful universities in the world.
After decades of invasion, war, neglect, and most recently the calamitous reign of the Taliban militia, Afghanistan’s Kabul University is struggling just to survive. With the threat of war hanging over the country, this forlorn university, where many professors and students long for contact with the outside world, is likely to become even more isolated.
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The medical school at Kabul University has better resources than the rest of the institution. (Photograph by Daniel del Castillo) |
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At one time, the university was a haven for intellectuals, scholars, and students from around Afghanistan and Central Asia, but the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the crippling civil wars since the Soviets left, in 1989, have plunged this country and its chief university back into the intellectual darkness of medieval times. The campus was partly rebuilt from the gray concrete rubble of its destruction, but entire sections of it still sit abandoned, as if a cease-fire had just started. In a good month, professors here draw a salary of $10.
“There is no viable higher education in Afghanistan today,” says Nancy Dupree, who directs the Afghan Resource Information Center, a research center and library just across the border in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.
Kabul University was for a time a killing zone, says its chancellor, Hajj Maulvi Pir Muhammad Rohani, a rugged-looking Afghan who wears a faded saffron turban and, like many traditional Afghan men, a thick layer of cerulean eyeliner.
“The university was in the center of the fighting, literally on the front lines,” he says. “In the mid-1990s, before the Taliban took control and established peace here, the university was used as a center for torture and killing.”
Founded as a medical school in 1932, Kabul University expanded into a general, secular institution. But under the Taliban, religious subjects are now mandatory for all students, and many books are partly censored or banned altogether, especially those containing photographs of living beings.
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The dormitories at Kabul University are still damaged from the civil war. (Photograph by Daniel del Castillo) |
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When the Taliban took control of Kabul, in 1996, women were barred from teaching or studying. Recently, they have been allowed back into the medical school, to train female physicians who could treat female patients -- the Taliban leaders do not approve of contact between unrelated men and women.
In 1996, about 60 percent of the university’s faculty members and undergraduates were women. Now the university has about 5,000 male students and about 350 female medical students. Once in a while, women are allowed to take undergraduate examinations at home, but they cannot attend classes that are not at the medical school, says Ms. Dupree, who lived in Kabul from the 1960s until she was expelled by the Taliban two years ago.
Former professors from Kabul lament the rise of the Taliban and are still angry about their dismissal. “I so enjoyed teaching, and I would give anything to be a professor again,” says Nazifa Abidy, a former professor of engineering. Ms. Abidy now helps Afghan refugees get vocational skills at a Peshawar-based charity called Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance. “I predict an entire generation of Afghans will be illiterate if things continue the way they are going in Afghanistan now,” she says.
Mahbooba Hoquqmal, who was once dean of Kabul’s law school, remembers the day her career in academe ended. The Taliban, she says, “didn’t even have the decency to announce it to us in person. They just made a statement on the radio.” Ms. Hoquqmal, who is also in exile in Peshawar, heads the Afghan Lawyers Society and the Committee for the Defense of Afghan Women, which provides legal advice to Afghan refugees.
High-ranking Taliban officials say they are perplexed by the West’s fascination with their treatment of women. “We have enough problems with the education of men, and in those affairs no one asks us about that,” says Qari Mullah Din Muhammad Hanif, the Taliban minister of higher education. “The West always wants to focus on the point of women here.”
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A vacant classroom has no glass in the windows and bullet marks on the walls. (Photograph by Daniel del Castillo) |
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Mr. Hanif sits behind an elaborately carved wooden desk in a lime-green office decorated with plastic hibiscus flowers and plush furniture. His assistants bring in dried chickpeas, raisins, and almonds on round trays. A stenographer records the interview. He is, like many members of the Taliban ruling elite, a product of Islamic education. He attended a madrassa, or Islamic college, in Pakistan and has no experience administering secular higher education.
“Every nation, people, and government knows what is best for the welfare and happiness of its own people,” he says. “We in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan are making improvements in our nation, and we feel that the system we have selected is the best.”
In the bombed-out building of the Ministry of Higher Education, where empty window frames, peeling plaster, and bullet-pocked walls testify to the legacy of war, Mr. Hanif plots the future of higher education in Afghanistan. He says it will be neither fully secular nor religious, but refuses to elaborate beyond that. To help improve the university, he says he will try to forge links to universities in the West -- although he is not sure which ones. Right now, incursions by American commandos seem more likely than visits by Western professors.
The only department at Kabul University that seems to be functioning is the medical school, which has essentially been rebuilt by Loma Linda University. The California institution has given Kabul University a library, computers, and staff members in an effort to provide some semblance of instruction.
The Taliban has banned medical students from dissecting cadavers, so the would-be doctors glean nearly all of their learning from textbooks, much to the chagrin of Sayed Abdullah Hashemi, the medical school’s dean. But Mr. Rohani notes that given the university’s erratic supply of electricity, it couldn’t preserve cadavers anyway.
The university’s students are grateful for any type of secular higher education, however limited. “I would like to go and study in America, but for me it’s nearly impossible,” says Sulayman, a third-year veterinary student who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. “We have almost nothing here at the university. Our situation is very desperate.”
Western scholars like Ms. Dupree have little hope that anything will improve at Kabul University or any of Afghanistan’s other five institutions of higher learning. Aid workers have abandoned Kabul.
Ms. Dupree speaks as if she were Afghan herself, lamenting that “we don’t even have much education” to provide a base for higher education in the future.
Ms. Dupree says most professionals capable of administering anything more than a quasi-religious government have left the country. “As soon as anybody acquires any kind of skill, they’re off to Europe, the United States, or Australia. If we had peace tomorrow, there would not be the human resources necessary to rebuild that country. And the human-resource base is shrinking, and shrinking, and shrinking,” she says. With refugees literally pounding on the locked gates at the Pakistan border, Afghanistan’s brain drain may soon be complete.
Background articles from The Chronicle: