By MARTY LEVINE
One year into the Afghanistan Project — conceived to help “preserve the intellectual community of Afghanistan,” says founder Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili — there are now 11 scholars, some with their families, here at Pitt to continue their work, assist those who remain in the country, and eventually return.
The Afghanistan Project provides two full years of funding to support the lives of academics and other scholars who had to flee the Taliban takeover of the government when the U.S. pulled out. Run through the Center for Governance and Markets (CGM) in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, where Murtazashvili is a professor, the initial year of the project has been both challenging and rewarding, she says. “We want to give our scholars a sense of wholeness and dignity. I just can’t imagine how hard it is for them.”
Each scholar has a mentor in their discipline, since they need to learn not only America’s academic culture but its culture in general. Murtazashvili says she is “very proud of what our CGM community has done. Not only do we have scholars, but we have spouses and children here as well. We’ve taken them to a Pitt football game and a pumpkin patch …”
“It’s a really great asset to the University,” she adds of the scholars’ work. “I imagine these people are going to be very great assets to Afghanistan when they return.”
Some of the scholars are graduate students in doctorate or law school programs. Many are professors, or in the midst of multi-pronged careers.
That includes Khalid Ramizy, who has been promoting liberal democracy and a free society for years as CEO of the Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization; founder and senior fellow at The White Assembly, a nonprofit working in 19 Afghanistan provinces with more than 10,000 members to oppose radicalism among youth; and founder and director of Silk Road Online Radio and TV, Afghanistan’s first online educational stations.
“I hadn’t tried to leave the country and I wanted to continue my work ... until the last moment,” Ramizy says. That work included writing, translating and publishing a number of books about classical liberal ideas. But when the Taliban took power, “my life was under a strong threat. Obviously they will capture me and kill me or torture me. There was only one choice — I should escape the country.”
He hid in Kabul in various safe spaces for a week, then the U.S. State Department got him to the airport, where he ended up in Albania and found he would have to wait more than a year to be granted entry into the U.S. In the meantime, he was able to go to Turkey and get his mother out of Afghanistan, but getting out of Turkey proved difficult. There, he agitated for civil rights — women’s rights, immigrants’ rights — in his native country, which caused the Turkish government to threaten his deportation back to Afghanistan, he says.
“They were thinking I was a spy for the United States in Turkey,” Ramizy reports. “After a lot of challenges” in court, the Afghanistan Project helped him get a visa to come to Pittsburgh — one of the few academic programs to provide such assistance — and he made “the second escape of my life.” He arrived in Pittsburgh on May 3, 2022.
At Pitt, “I found a very supportive community,” he says. “I am able to continue my work for Afghanistan” from here, he adds. “CGM gave to me a community of scholars” as well as “a kind of freedom that I never experienced in my life until the moment I arrived in Pittsburgh” allowing him to travel to give presentations on his scholarship, as well as “to have the opportunity to think strategically about my future plans.”
His current efforts include a book he has just finished, “Stolen Republic,” which he labels “untold facts behind the tragic collapse of the 20-year-old republic in Afghanistan … to share with the world how the United States failed in nation building and establishing democracy in Afghanistan.” It is a journalistic memoir in Farsi for an Afghan audience.
He also continues to work with his think tank and with other scholarly groups who hope to shape the future of their country. “We Afghans are the victims of extremism in the world. Hopefully, we will experience a lot of changes soon or very soon. … It is very important for activists and for scholars like us to continue with our fight for our ideas in Afghanistan.”
Noting the long waits for asylum in the U.S., he urges that “the United States must stand with the Afghan people who are inside the country and outside the country” because these people helped the United States in Afghanistan.
“The Biden administration couldn’t wait to forget Afghanistan,” says Jennifer Murtazashvili, who believes this country has “no desire to learn lessons about what went wrong.”
She too is writing an academic book on why the state-building effort there did not succeed. It is called “Built to Fail,” penned with Mohammad Qadam Shah from Afghanistan who is a faculty member at Seattle Pacific University. “It wasn’t that democracy didn’t work in Afghanistan, it was that it was never really tried,” she says. The U.S. promised the Afghan people could participate in their government, she explains, then didn’t allow votes for local government, instead appointing such officials.
Meanwhile, here at Pitt, “it’s been much hard work,” she concludes, but “it’s been a really incredible year.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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