For 20 years, science has blossomed in Afghanistan. Now many researchers are fleeing and those who remain face lost funding and the threat of persecution.

On Sunday 15 August, geologist Hamidullah Waizy was interviewing job candidates at the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum in Kabul when he was told the Taliban had entered the city, and he must evacuate. The next morning, he saw armed militants on the streets.

Waizy, a researcher at Kabul Polytechnic University who was recently also appointed director-general of prospecting and exploration of mines at the ministry, was shocked by the city’s rapid fall. Since then, he’s lived in limbo, mostly shuttered up in the relative safety of his home.

Across Kabul, most universities and public offices remain closed. The Taliban says it wants officials to continue working, but it is not clear what this will look like. “The future is very uncertain,” Waizy told Nature.

When the fundamentalist group last held the country, in 1996–2001, it brutally enforced a conservative version of Islamic Sharia law, characterized by women’s-rights violations and suppression of freedom of expression. But after it was overthrown in 2001, international funding poured into Afghanistan and universities thrived.

Now, academics fear for their own safety. They also worry that research will languish without money and personal freedoms, and because educated people will flee. Some fear that they could be persecuted for being involved in international collaborations, or because of their fields of study or their ethnicity.

Hard-earned gains

“The achievements we had over the past 20 years are all at great risk,” says Attaullah Ahmadi, a public-health scientist at Kateb University in Kabul.

According to news reports, billions of dollars in overseas finance for Afghanistan’s government — such as assets held by the US Federal Reserve and credit from the International Monetary Fund — have been frozen. It’s not clear whether or when the funding will be released, and how that will affect universities and researchers, but many report salaries not being paid.

In 2001, after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, a US-led coalition invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban. In 2004, a new government was elected.

Kenneth Holland, a dean at O.P. Jindal Global University in Sonipat, India, was president of the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) in Kabul in 2017–19. He says that when he arrived in the country in 2006, he found “almost no research being done at universities; no culture of research”.

Since 2004, the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development and other international organizations have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into universities to support teaching, faculty training and some research, he says.

Some three dozen public universities have been established or re-established since 2010, and tens more private universities have been set up. Public universities are funded by the Ministry of Higher Education, which is financed by international donors, says Holland. Private universities survive on tuition fees, although the AUAF is mostly funded by the US government.

Hopes and aspirations

The student population at public universities grew from 8,000 in 2001 to 170,000 in 2018, one-quarter of whom by that time were women. And although Afghanistan’s contribution to international journals remained small, the number of papers recorded annually in the Scopus database increased from 71 in 2011 to 285 in 2019.

Shakardokht Jafari, a medical physicist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, who is originally from Afghanistan, has seen much progress since 2001, from burgeoning enrolment of female students to growing output on topics from cancer to geology. But now she fears “there will be a stagnation of science and research progress”.

For a long time “scientists considered Afghanistan a black hole”, says Najibullah Kakar, a geohazards scientist at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. He is one of many Afghans who went abroad for their education, intending to return with new skills to help build the nation. In 2014, he helped to install Afghanistan’s first seismic network to study plate tectonics. He continued that work until 2019, when conflicts made it difficult to travel to remote areas.

He and his team planned to establish a seismic monitoring and research centre in Afghanistan to warn of natural hazards. But since the fall of Kabul, they have been in a state of panic, and Kakar, who says he has not slept for days, is desperately trying to help get his colleagues out.