Afghan scholars despair after Taliban’s takeover

doi:10.1126/science.373.6558.948

GSTDTAP > 气候变化

DOI	10.1126/science.373.6558.948
	Afghan scholars despair after Taliban’s takeover
	Richard Stone
	2021-08-27
发表期刊	Science
出版年	2021
英文摘要	Twice the Taliban tried to kill Khyber Mashal[*][1]. Its first attempt was in 2009, when the Afghan scientist was working on a development project for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Gardez, in southeastern Afghanistan. Taliban fighters planted a bomb below his office, says Mashal, who was away on a short trip to Germany at the time. Five colleagues died in the blast. Then in July 2019, when Mashal was working for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education, a suicide bomber staggered in front of his car in Kabul. “He seemed intoxicated,” he says. A quick-thinking police officer tased the man and removed his explosives-laden vest. Why is the Taliban so eager to take him out? “Because they’re antiscience,” Mashal says. “Educated people are targeted because we have transformed the country.” His past affiliation with a U.S. organization added to the jeopardy. Mashal left Afghanistan with his wife in December 2020 for a yearlong fellowship at a German university. Now, after the Taliban’s lightning-fast takeover of the country, many other scientists are trying to join the exodus. Afghanistan had come a long way since the Taliban last ruled from 1996 to 2001 under a harsh interpretation of Sharia law in which it deprived women of civil liberties and summarily executed intellectuals and others opposed to its ideology. After its ouster, Afghanistan’s higher education institutions burgeoned from a handful to more than 100, and women entered the workforce en masse. Taliban leaders insist they have moderated their views, but few Afghans are willing to take those reassurances at face value. As recently as 2016, an attack by suspected Taliban fighters on the American University of Afghanistan killed 13 people and wounded more than 50. The gains women have made in Afghan society “will fade and be eliminated,” predicts an engineer at Avicenna University, a private institute opened in Kabul in 2010, who asked to remain anonymous because she says her life is in danger. “The future is very dark” for scholars who remain in Afghanistan, says Mohammad Assem Mayar, a water management expert at Kabul Polytechnic University who worked with scientists at the University of California, Irvine, and the U.S. Geological Survey to model flood risks. Mayar recently found succor at the University of Stuttgart, but colleagues marooned in Afghanistan dread the coming days. The Avicenna engineer, who has also collaborated with U.S. researchers, says she and her family fled their apartment in Kabul earlier this week. “The Taliban were going door to door looking for us,” she says. She and her family applied for U.S. visas 6 years ago but are still waiting for a decision. Now, she’s counting on colleagues in the United States to pull strings on their behalf. She has “no hope” of surviving in Afghanistan. As Science went to press, European and U.S. officials were scrambling to get her and hundreds of other Afghan scholars and their families out of Kabul. Last week, several members of the Afghan robotics team—young women who gained fame for their ingenuity in international competitions—managed to leave on flights to Qatar. But reaching Kabul’s airport means running a gauntlet of Taliban fighters and passing several checkpoints. Scientists stranded outside the capital, including a female scientist holed up in a basement in the western city of Herat, say it’s too dangerous to travel to Kabul now. In an 18 August letter with more than 3400 signatories, Robert Quinn, executive director of the Scholars at Risk (SAR) Network, urged U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to relax visa requirements for Afghans and continue evacuation flights until all “scholars, students, and civil society actors” are out. SAR has received hundreds of pleas for assistance over the past several days, Quinn says. Things could turn very bleak very fast for scholars left behind—even those not in the Taliban’s crosshairs. Mayar anticipates that a cash-strapped Taliban regime is unlikely to pay salaries to university faculty and staff, as happened during its previous rule. “There’s also a high potential that academic facilities will be looted,” says Alex Dehgan, who as country director for the Wildlife Conservation Society from 2006 to 2008 helped establish Afghanistan’s first national park, Band-e-Amir. Academic life is inimical to the Taliban’s ideology, Mashal says. “Hardly anybody in the Taliban leadership is educated,” he says. Rank-and-file fighters are mostly “brainwashed kids coming out of the madrassahs. They’re trained to only think about two things: heaven and hell.” In a sign that the Taliban intends to assert control over universities, it installed its own rector at Paktia University in Gardez. “Their idea is to handicap these institutions. Push them back to the first century,” Mashal says. Many U.S. institutions are trying to protect former collaborators by purging their websites and social media accounts of any mention of past cooperation. And they are coordinating with Biden administration officials and Congress on how to steer scholars to safe harbors. Michigan State University’s Grain Research and Innovation Project, for example, has trained researchers in Kabul in recent years and placed 33 students—including 12 women—in graduate programs at Kabul University and two Indian universities. Now, the program is trying to rescue the researchers it nurtured. “We want to find a good home for them where they can practice their science, where they can raise their families, where they can be safe and secure,” says project director Kurt Richter. From his haven in Germany, Mashal has arranged a visa for an Afghan student to come to his university for doctoral studies. With his own fellowship ending in November, Mashal has applied to SAR for his next lifeline. He has no intention of returning to Afghanistan while the Taliban is in power: “I don’t want to die.” But he agonizes over the perils his friends and remaining family members face back home. As Kabul was about to fall, he developed “extreme anxiety” and now has trouble sleeping. “I try to console my colleagues. I try to console my family. And I try to console myself,” he says. “But it’s so painful to see the devastation. The loss of everything we risked our lives for.” [1]: #fn-1
领域	气候变化 ; 资源环境
URL	查看原文
引用统计
文献类型	期刊论文
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.173/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/336602
专题	气候变化资源环境科学
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Richard Stone. Afghan scholars despair after Taliban’s takeover[J]. Science,2021.
APA	Richard Stone.(2021).Afghan scholars despair after Taliban’s takeover.Science.
MLA	Richard Stone."Afghan scholars despair after Taliban’s takeover".Science (2021).