Universities with established links to institutions in Afghanistan should try to ¡°stand by them for the benefit of the Afghan people¡± as the country faces a struggle to avoid a major humanitarian crisis, according to a leading scholar on conflict resolution.

Sultan Barakat, founding director of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Qatar, said maintaining ¡°continuity¡± in research and educational networks would be extremely tough owing to the political and economic challenges now facing the nation under Taliban control.

However, education, especially as a potential way to broaden the Taliban¡¯s outlook, may be the only way to find a peaceful way forward, said Professor Barakat, an honorary professorship at the University of York, where he led the institution¡¯s Post-war Reconstruction and Development Unit? between 1993 and 2016.

Data from Elsevier¡¯s Scopus database of indexed research suggests that scholarly publications involving academics in Afghanistan had just begun to substantially pick up in the past five years, after years of slow growth.

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The number of papers published in 2020, 324, was at an extremely low level and three-quarters involved international collaboration, yet that number had quadrupled since 2015 and appeared to be on a sustained rise.

Professor Barakat, whose centre in Qatar has hosted discussions on achieving peace in Afghanistan in recent months, addressed by the now-deposed president Ashraf Ghani in June, said his view was that the Taliban leadership were in principle ¡°much more open to education¡± than when they were in power in the late 1990s.

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¡°But the limitation is in their capacity to being able to deliver on all these promises¡± given the lack of education among their rank and file, the brain drain from the country and what their actual attitude to women¡¯s education will be, he added.

¡°It is not only that they [the Taliban] don¡¯t have qualified people among their ranks, the few qualified in the country have been evacuated. Long term, that is going to be very negative,¡± Professor Barakat continued.

For Afghan universities, there is concern about their ability to continue to function, ¡°in terms of continuity and whether they would be able to maintain those research and education links that have developed over the years. The ones with the West were particularly expensive¡­so they had to be subsidised¡± from overseas, he said.

Foreign universities that established links with Afghan universities ¡°should really stand by them for the benefit of the Afghan people rather than look to move them elsewhere¡±, continued Professor Barakat.

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simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com