What happened to female college graduates before and during the Taliban rule? Did they try to seek a job or leave the country with their families?
Were there any Muslim men that tried to protect their families, especially female relatives and friends, from the Taliban?
they married and got busy raising children. Just like the female high school graduates, female primary school graduates and female kindergarten dropouts (if any).
Why do you suppose they needed any special protection from the Taliban?
Educated people are usually the first people targeted by totalitarian regimes.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge slaughtered every educated person they could find. Even wearing glasses would get you killed. The Nazis went after the Jewish Scholars and Philosophers when they invaded Poland. Educated people are always targets.
It was a crime under the Taliban to educate a girl. I wouldn’t want it known if I was a college educated female. I think that information would be hidden at all costs.
There were several acid attacks against school girls in Afghanistan within the past few years.
Pol Pot had it in his demented world-view that those contaminated by western education, training, ideas, or technology, anyone who had advanced beyond the traditional peasant life - these people were “contaminated” and if they appeared unable to forget this contamination, society was better off with them dead to get back to that peasant way of life. Of course, anyone who opposed this view must also be contaminated.
The Taliban just did not want girls educated. I presume any school was visited by the Taliban when they took power; they ensured that the curriculum was not contaminated with non-islamic ideas, the wrong people were not being educated, etc. I never heard they went on a witch hunt for intellectuals of either sex, they simply forbade education for girls and forbade public participation of any women, simply because it wasn’t necessary. Of course, like any totalitarian theocratic regime, opposing their views was tantamount to heresy with predictable consequences… plus if the women were caught using nail polish, they would rip out their nails with pliers. Allah akhbar!