Many now have to experience how everything slips between their hands.
The British newspaper "The Guardian" reports on a student at the American University of Kabul who burned her diplomas.
If they had been discovered on her, she would probably have had to pay for it with her life.
According to media reports, the university burned its servers, saying that it does not want to incriminate former helpers.
The employees are on the run in a security zone.
Thomas Thiel
Editor in the features section.
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A new ice age is imminent for Afghan universities. The geography professor Andreas Dittmann, who has supported the establishment of the Afghan universities for twenty years, suspects that operations will continue. But he can hardly defend himself against the feeling that everything that has been achieved since then has been in vain. Dittmann, who is also President of the German-Afghan University Society, remembers what was found twenty years ago: curricula that combined content from the Soviet period with hours of prayer.
The project group he supervised as part of a DAAD program was proud to be able to present the first post-Taliban geography curriculum.
Germany had taken over responsibility for geosciences, computer science, medicine and German as a foreign language at the University of Kabul, the country's most prestigious university.
Courses of study and lecturers were trained who were supposed to bring the Afghan university operations to international level.
The proportion of female students grew from zero to more than twenty percent.
Nobody believes the Taliban
The warning signs were also visible in the education sector. After the attack on the German embassy in 2017, the DAAD gave up its office in Kabul, and most of it has now been continued digitally. The development of the university system has repeatedly been held up by political setbacks, says German studies professor Hermann Funk, who set up the department for German as a foreign language at the University of Kabul from the University of Jena. Fifteen female Afghan students were led to their Masters in Jena, a quarter of them went back to Afghanistan to rebuild the country. It was an overwhelming experience to see how liberated the young women felt who came to Jena back then - in jeans, without a burqa.
Funk has succeeded in evacuating one of his doctoral students from Kabul; the other five employees in the department, including two women, are still on site and face an uncertain future. None of them believe that women are allowed to continue teaching and studying at universities, as the Taliban announced in their first press conference, while women’s faces are pasted on posters and journalists are hunted. Whether the male lecturers trained with Western help are allowed to continue teaching (and living) depends on whether they are viewed as collaborators and on which faction prevails under the Taliban. Many universities are currently closed or have limited operations. Many students and scientists are in hiding.
The Afghan universities owe their heyday to Western intervention. Given the average government investment of sixty dollars per year per student, they will not be able to maintain today's standards on their own, quite apart from the fact that the Taliban may not be interested in them. Many areas financed from abroad are likely to be closed.
The DAAD, which has funded 230 projects with a total of fifty million euros, wants to make the continuation of its funding dependent on political developments. “Our fundamental commitment is: We stand by the people in Afghanistan. But the effectiveness of the measures must be guaranteed, ”says DAAD Secretary General Kai Sicks. Based on the experience of recent years, the funding structures in Germany are solid. The DAAD has launched the new Hilde Domin program for refugee students and doctoral candidates, while the Alexandervon Humboldt Foundation supports exiled scholars within the Philipp Schwartz Initiative. Both programs still have open capacities. At the moment, no one is able to assess how many manage to escape.