1997
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INTERNATIONAL REPORTING |
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Index | 2/5 | 2/14 | 10/1 | 10/7 | 10/14 | 10/15 | 10/27 | 11/3 | 11/30 | 12/31
Afghan Capital Grim as War Follows War
On borrowed bicycles, they planned to cross siege lines to the south of the city, load
up with sacks of flour, cans of gasoline and bundles of firewood, and be back home
by noon. From the 300 percent price difference between the Kabul bazaars and the traders
outside the city, they calculated that they would make enough money to pay the
bicycle owners and keep their families from the hunger and cold of Kabul for a
month. A few hours later, one of the five, a former professional boxer named Hamid, was
near death in the intensive care unit of a hospital about a mile behind the front lines.
Villagers who found him said four of the five young men had been killed by
machine-gun fire that met them as they rounded a corner in the no man's land
separating Afghan Government troops from the besieging forces of the Taliban, a
militant Islamic force that pushed to within a mile of Kabul's outskirts last fall. In the dim room where Hamid lay semiconscious, the only sounds were the groans
and wheezing of others fighting for their lives from wounds suffered in bombing
raids, mine explosions, artillery barrages and forays across the front lines by people
like Hamid. At least 20 traders were killed last week alone. Occasionally, one of the wounded cried out weakly: "Allah. Allah. Grant us mercy."This spring, it will be 18 years since Marxist conspirators overthrew the Afghan
President and set off a civil war. Next week, it will be seven years since the
withdrawal of the last of the Soviet troops who invaded the country in December
1979, ostensibly in support of those Marxist rulers, only to be bludgeoned in a
nine-year conflict with American-backed Muslim guerrillas that devastated much of
the country and gravely weakened the Soviet Union itself. In April, it will be four years since the puppet Communist Government that the
Russians left behind in Kabul finally collapsed, giving way to a new civil war
between rival Muslim groups whose enmity for one another turned out to be as great
as their hatred of the Soviet invaders. Ruinous Times: Wars Bring Misery And Exile to Millions The miseries heaped on this ancient land by the years of fighting are captured in the
grim statistics kept by United Nations officials who try to lessen the unending
suffering with their relief efforts. In a country that had a population of 15.5 million in the last census before the
Communist takeover, at least one million people have been killed, and two million
have been displaced from their homes to other towns and cities inside Afghanistan.
Six million others have been driven across the borders into Pakistan and Iran. Less
than half of those refugees have returned since the end of Communist rule in 1992. About two million others, international relief agencies estimate, have been
permanently disabled, either physically or mentally. On the crumbling sidewalks of Kabul, in the overcrowded hospital wards and at the
brick-oven bakeries that face clamoring crowds at first light each day, there is an
angry consensus that no time since the Communist coup in April 1978 has been as
bitter as now. So dispirited is the mood that it is common to hear people say what would have been
unthinkable in the years when the Soviet occupation was a synonym for brutality:
that the "Russian time," as it is known, was not so bad after all, at least in Kabul. "Ah, the Russian time -- that was golden, compared with this," said a doctor at the
Karte Seh Hospital, watching stretcher bearers carrying in the body of a 14-year-old
boy whose brain had been blown out of his skull by a Taliban bombing raid. Partly, the gloom is a product of the winter, one of the harshest in memory, with
temperatures that sink to near zero at night, chilling mud-walled homes that still
stand amid the rubble that is all that remains of at least half of Kabul. Scores of
people go to hospitals each morning with frostbite. Partly, it is the scarcity of food, made worse than ever this winter by a tightening of
the siege by the Muslim guerrilla groups that control the roads leading to Kabul from
Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, Jalalabad in the east and Kandahar in the south. These roads, lifelines that have never before been completely shut off for more than
a few days, have been closed for much of the last month, creating a crisis as stocks
of flour and cooking oil and other staples in United Nations warehouses dwindle. On Saturday, the International Committee of the Red Cross began an emergency
airlift from Peshawar in Pakistan, a 70-minute flight across the mountains to the
east. With several shuttles a day, the Swiss-based relief agency plans to bring in
more than 1,000 metric tons of wheat to Bagram, a former Soviet air base in a
remote area 20 miles northeast of Kabul that is still under Government control. The airlift planners hope to show the besieging guerrillas that they cannot starve out
the city. But more than the privations of cold and hunger and gunfire, it is a sense of
hopelessness that seems to gnaw at the 1.2 million people of this city. "Afghanistan is no more," said Aysha, the mother-in-law of Hamid, the bicycle
trader who took a bullet in the chest. "We have been abandoned by the world." Aysha, who like many Afghans uses only one name, sobbed as she clutched the
young man's hand. "The people who did this are no Muslims," she said. "They are
the henchmen of Satan, and they will surely suffer in hell." Doctors said they did
not expect Hamid to survive. Islam's Liberators Pledge of Peace Soon Vanishes A year ago, when the Taliban forces first pushed to the gates of Kabul, many in the
city saw them as potential liberators, despite stories of their intolerance in the first
city they captured, Kandahar, where the movement was formed and has its
headquarters. There, women were denied the right to work, ordered to wear full veils over their
faces and punished if caught outside their homes with men other than their fathers or
brothers. Word of these strictures appeared to have less of an impact on the people of Kabul
than the Taliban's success in overwhelming several of the contending guerrilla
groups left over from the Soviet occupation. But the Taliban's promise that it would end the war and the battering of the civilian
population, then step aside for a popularly elected government, evaporated quickly. Soon, the militants were following the example of the guerrilla groups they
supplanted, pounding Kabul with heavy artillery. In May, throngs in the capital
celebrated when the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the military commander who
is the power behind the Government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, struck the
Taliban combatants with a lightning offensive and drove them back 30 miles from
the capital. But in September, the Taliban was back. After capturing the western city of Herat
from Ismail Khan, an ally of Mr. Massoud, the militants drove back up the road to
Kabul and threatened to overrun the city before Mr. Massoud's defenses stiffened. Since then, the daily artillery barrages have resumed, along with bombing attacks by
the Taliban's embryonic air force. Thousands more have died, bringing the civilian
toll in the capital since the Communist collapse in 1992 to at least 25,000, officials
of the International Committee of the Red Cross say. Government estimates put the death toll far higher, at least 45,000. But even at the
lower figure, Kabul has suffered more in terms of sheer destruction and in the
number killed than Sarajevo, where 10,000 to 15,000 people are said to have died
during the 40 months of Serbian bombardments that ended last fall. And because there is only a vestigial international presence here -- no United
Nations military force of the kind that attempted to mitigate the conflict in Bosnia,
and only skeleton staffs at the United Nations and other international relief agencies
that distribute food, medical supplies and other aid -- the civilian population's
distress seems more acute. Last week, quieter than many since the fall, there were at least three attacks on
bicyclists crossing the front lines in search of food, fuel and firewood, and a Taliban
bombing attack in which two jets dropped four 1,000-pound bombs. Two of the bombs exploded in a district of southern Kabul that was reduced to acres
of rubble in bombardments that leveled much of the city from 1992 to 1995.
Because much of the population still lives amid the rubble, the bombs fell in a busy
street, killing at least 20 people and wounding many more. Hospital emergency
rooms were awash with blood. Government officials place blame for the carnage on Pakistan, which has backed the
Taliban, apparently to win favor with two powerful Pakistani groups -- Islamic
militants, and Pakistan's own population of ethnic Pathans, who are
indistinguishable from the Afghan Pathans who predominate in the Taliban force. Pakistan's role has angered Iran, Russia and India, which have given concerted
support in recent months to the Rabbani Government even though it is led and
dominated by members of the ethnic Tajik minority that has held power in
Afghanistan only once before in the last 250 years. Each night, planes carrying arms, ammunition, spare parts and other suppplies paid
for by Teheran, Moscow and Delhi land at the Bagram air base, leaving telltale
vapor trails in the starry skies over Kabul. Almost as much opprobrium is directed at the United States, which poured more
than $5 billion of money and arms into the Muslim guerrilla struggle against the
Soviet forces, then virtually disappeared as a factor in Afghan affairs after the cold
war ended. A relief effort by the United States Agency for International Development ended in
1994, and American aid channeled through the United Nations and other relief
groups has fallen to between $40 million and $60 million a year, the United States
Embassy in Pakistan estimates. American diplomacy has been limited to
encouraging a United Nations mediation effort that has never come close to
persuading the contending Muslim groups to end the fighting. Many in Kabul share the view of President Rabbani's Foreign Minister, Najibullah
Lafraie, who said in an interview that the United States had a moral responsibility to
re-engage in Afghanistan's affairs because of its role in the struggle against the
Soviet occupation. "We believed we were fighting for the freedom of the whole world, not just for the
freedom of Afghanistan," said Mr. Lafraie, who was awarded a doctorate by the
University of Hawaii in the 1980's. "We fought against the country that Ronald
Reagan called the evil empire, and it was as a result of our sacrifices that the evil
empire collapsed. But afterward we were forgotten." Pointless Combat: A Society Beyond Despair But political arguments seem lost on the poorest people of Kabul, who move
through their days with an air of hopelessness that seems to be beyond despair. Stories abound of mothers abandoning their children in mosques because they lack
food. Foreigners are approached at every stop by women beggars wearing the
full-face netted shrouds that are traditional among conservative Afghans. Packs of
stray dogs howl in the streets at night as they move between street-corner garbage
dumps. To many people, the distinctions between the rival Muslim groups long ago lost
significance, and the Rabbani Government has become virtually indistinguishable
from its Communist predecessor. Officials like Mr. Lafraie sit in the same offices, served by some of the same
obsequious aides, and ride in the same curtained Mercedes-Benz sedans. Like the
Communist Government, the Rabbani administration leaves most relief efforts to
international organizations. When the Afghan currency loses half of its value in a
matter of days, as it did when the roads were blocked in January, it is the ordinary
people, not senior Government officials, who go hungry. On the front lines, the war seems to have attained a purposeless momentum of its
own. Young men, some in their mid-teens, take the winter sunshine on battered
steel chairs, adorned in a bizarre mixture of American and Soviet camouflage
fatigues, as if to emphasize the irrelevance of the political disinctions that once
fueled the fighting. For them, life has been reduced to rounds of banditry, exacting tolls from those who
return with their modest bounty from Taliban-held territory on bicycles and
horsecarts. Sometimes the day's round turns to seemingly mindless violence. When two 10-year-old scavengers traipsed past one roadblock near the front lines
carrying sacks filled with farming implements, one young soldier overheard one of
the boys saying he did not understand what the war was about, and saw nothing to
choose from between the Rabbani Government and the Taliban. The soldier took the boy by the ear, twisted it and extracted a vow of loyalty to Mr.
Massoud. Then he adjusted his Soviet tank crewman's helmet and smiled. "This war will never end," he said. |
