As US pullout nears, anxiety over future of university

Like just about everything else that the West has built in Afghanistan over the past decade, the American University of Kabul remains half-complete, heavily reliant on foreign aid for the foreseeable future and seized by a paralysing question: How much will endure after the US military leaves by the end of next year? asks Ernesto Londoño for The Washington Post.

In many ways, the university embodies the type of country that the United States set out to build a decade ago; some still hope that it will endure as a pillar of the legacy of America’s longest war. Yet, as US troops prepare to end their combat mission in Afghanistan, there is a foreboding about the future on this campus, and a sense that the school may not survive as the incubator of talent and entrepreneurship that Washington sought to create.

Long-term funding for the university is uncertain, and many students have come to see their degrees as a ticket out of Afghanistan. The country could be headed towards another civil war, said Sayed Mansoor Afzali, vice president of the student government association, who crammed a four-year degree programme into three – determined to graduate by the end of 2014.
Full report on The Washington Post site