A university survives on one quiet promise: that ideas will be judged on merit, not loyalty. In Afghanistan, that promise has been broken again, this time against the very people who once stood by the regime that broke it.
Kabul University has recently dismissed several professors from their teaching positions, among them Abdullah Kamawal, a member of the Islamic Party led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, along with Asadullah Wahidi and Faiz Mohammad Zaland.
What makes this episode remarkable is not simply that it happened, but who it happened to. All three academics had spent the past five years publicly supporting and advocating for the Taliban regime. They were not dissidents removed for criticism. They were allies removed without explanation.
This detail matters more than it might first appear. When a government purges its critics, it signals intolerance of opposition. When it purges its own supporters, it signals something far more unsettling: that no position, however loyal, guarantees safety within the system.
No public justification has been offered for these dismissals, and that silence is itself a message. It tells every remaining professor at Kabul University that their continued employment depends not on scholarship, not on service, not even on political alignment with the regime, but on factors that remain entirely opaque and beyond their control.
This is not an isolated administrative decision. It is a pattern that has defined the Taliban’s approach to higher education since their return to power. Universities under their rule have already seen the exclusion of women from classrooms, the reshaping of curricula along ideological lines, and the steady replacement of academic credentials with political reliability as the measure of who belongs in a lecture hall.
The dismissal of pro-Taliban professors simply extends this logic to its next stage. If ideological loyalty was the price of admission into the new academic order, these dismissals prove that even paying that price buys no lasting security.
For a country whose higher education system was already fragile after decades of conflict, this kind of institutional instability carries a heavy cost. Universities function on continuity.
Students need instructors who can plan a semester without wondering whether they will be teaching it. Departments need faculty who can build research programs across years, not months.
When positions can disappear overnight without cause, the entire academic enterprise becomes provisional. Talented scholars either leave the country, self-censor to avoid drawing attention, or abandon academia altogether for safer professions. Afghanistan can afford none of these outcomes, given how much of its educated class has already fled since 2021.
There is also a broader regional lesson here, one relevant to readers across South and Central Asia watching how ideological governance interacts with institutional independence.
Academic freedom is often discussed as an abstract value, something nice to have but not essential to a functioning state. This episode suggests otherwise. When universities become extensions of political control rather than centers of independent inquiry, the damage does not stay confined to campus gates. It shapes the quality of a country’s doctors, engineers, economists and policymakers for a generation. It determines whether a nation can eventually rebuild its institutions with competent, independently trained minds, or whether it produces only cadres trained to echo whichever position currently holds power.
The three professors dismissed from Kabul University were not martyrs of resistance. They were, by their own record, supporters of the very authority that has now discarded them. That is precisely why their removal deserves attention rather than indifference. It reveals a regime whose relationship with its own institutions is built on control rather than trust, where compliance is demanded but never rewarded with security. For Afghan academia, already stretched thin by years of restriction and departure, this is one more sign that the space for independent scholarship, and even for scholarship merely aligned with power, continues to shrink.
Youth across the region who care about education, governance and institutional integrity should watch this story closely. It is a reminder that the erosion of academic freedom rarely announces itself with a single dramatic act. More often, it arrives quietly, through unexplained dismissals and institutions slowly hollowed out from within, until one day there is little left of the university except its name.
The Taliban’s War on Academia
A university survives on one quiet promise: that ideas will be judged on merit, not loyalty. In Afghanistan, that promise has been broken again, this time against the very people who once stood by the regime that broke it.
Kabul University has recently dismissed several professors from their teaching positions, among them Abdullah Kamawal, a member of the Islamic Party led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, along with Asadullah Wahidi and Faiz Mohammad Zaland.
What makes this episode remarkable is not simply that it happened, but who it happened to. All three academics had spent the past five years publicly supporting and advocating for the Taliban regime. They were not dissidents removed for criticism. They were allies removed without explanation.
This detail matters more than it might first appear. When a government purges its critics, it signals intolerance of opposition. When it purges its own supporters, it signals something far more unsettling: that no position, however loyal, guarantees safety within the system.
No public justification has been offered for these dismissals, and that silence is itself a message. It tells every remaining professor at Kabul University that their continued employment depends not on scholarship, not on service, not even on political alignment with the regime, but on factors that remain entirely opaque and beyond their control.
This is not an isolated administrative decision. It is a pattern that has defined the Taliban’s approach to higher education since their return to power. Universities under their rule have already seen the exclusion of women from classrooms, the reshaping of curricula along ideological lines, and the steady replacement of academic credentials with political reliability as the measure of who belongs in a lecture hall.
The dismissal of pro-Taliban professors simply extends this logic to its next stage. If ideological loyalty was the price of admission into the new academic order, these dismissals prove that even paying that price buys no lasting security.
For a country whose higher education system was already fragile after decades of conflict, this kind of institutional instability carries a heavy cost. Universities function on continuity.
Students need instructors who can plan a semester without wondering whether they will be teaching it. Departments need faculty who can build research programs across years, not months.
When positions can disappear overnight without cause, the entire academic enterprise becomes provisional. Talented scholars either leave the country, self-censor to avoid drawing attention, or abandon academia altogether for safer professions. Afghanistan can afford none of these outcomes, given how much of its educated class has already fled since 2021.
There is also a broader regional lesson here, one relevant to readers across South and Central Asia watching how ideological governance interacts with institutional independence.
Academic freedom is often discussed as an abstract value, something nice to have but not essential to a functioning state. This episode suggests otherwise. When universities become extensions of political control rather than centers of independent inquiry, the damage does not stay confined to campus gates. It shapes the quality of a country’s doctors, engineers, economists and policymakers for a generation. It determines whether a nation can eventually rebuild its institutions with competent, independently trained minds, or whether it produces only cadres trained to echo whichever position currently holds power.
The three professors dismissed from Kabul University were not martyrs of resistance. They were, by their own record, supporters of the very authority that has now discarded them. That is precisely why their removal deserves attention rather than indifference. It reveals a regime whose relationship with its own institutions is built on control rather than trust, where compliance is demanded but never rewarded with security. For Afghan academia, already stretched thin by years of restriction and departure, this is one more sign that the space for independent scholarship, and even for scholarship merely aligned with power, continues to shrink.
Youth across the region who care about education, governance and institutional integrity should watch this story closely. It is a reminder that the erosion of academic freedom rarely announces itself with a single dramatic act. More often, it arrives quietly, through unexplained dismissals and institutions slowly hollowed out from within, until one day there is little left of the university except its name.
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