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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Sep-01 05:09 AM
Hi all,
What follows is pretty long, but quite interesting. This is an article written in
Feb. 2000 by one of my American friends from New York City, who lives and
works in Kathmandu.
As the US prepares for war, let us try to understand what Afganistan is like.
oohi
ashu
ktm, nepal
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Friends,
I may have sent this piece to you before. It's something I wrote
awhile back after my last trip to Afghanistan.
Given how the world is circling around Afghanistan once again --
afterignoring it for a decade or so -- I thought that some of the images
and impressions may be worth remembering. Hopefully, it provides a human
face to country that is tragically in the news today.
After all, we may lose something precious in ourselves if we forget
the human face of individuals as violence and rhetoric fill the void of
our shattered emotions. We have already seen the damage done by such
inner emptiness.
my regards,
Keith
********************************************
The Edge of Afghanistan
By Keith Leslie
February 2000
There is no easy road into Kabul. A country at war with itself and its neighbors for over twenty years is not a pretty place. The devastation is everywhere and immediate. Even upon entering the country from Pakistan at the foot of the Khyber Pass, the stream of humanity flowing across the border gives an indication of the troubles ahead. Almost all of the traffic is going one way: out.
There are the villagers burdened by overflowing bundles on their heads, the conspicuous trail of goats and the young children carrying even younger children on their backs. Then there is the image that obviates all the others: the small girl all alone toting a heavy piece of used armament. She is hidden amid the perpetual column of dust moving innocuously yet persistently ahead into the distance.
That is the difference here. The debris of war is all around. Broken shells of tanks, turrets and weaponry. Not the sacred green of Islam, but the scarred khaki iron from decades of depleted military campaigns. This is the gateway to Afghanistan, now one of the most isolated lands in Asia. Rising above the Pakistan border is the land route through which centuries of invasions and caravans have passed to the warmth and wealth of the Indus plains.
But the one's childhood dreams of romance and adventure are gone and the weapons of ages past buried and disintegrated in the soil. Here, as we leave the Northwest Frontier and head toward Kabul, such myth has been replaced by a profound sense of pain and fortitude that survive along this road. Unpaved, untravelled, unconnected, the road to Afghanistan has been lost for the time being to the world outside.
Even in a landcruiser, the journey is wearying as it has been decades since this road was last repaired or maintained. We sink and rise like on the waves of a sea voyage or sitting on camels crossing the desert. Already, the motion is from the past, not the present.
As we enter the Khyber Pass, we start to climb. To the right, on a barren ridge rests a stupendous, dry brick, 3rd century Greco-Buddhist Gandharan stupa, sixty feet tall with a girth over a hundred feet -- a silent, tragic memory of Buddha's message of compassion. We continue along this road sans pavement for most of the two hundred kilometers journey. Momentarily relaxing along a dozen kilometers of paved highway around the city of Jalalabad, where the road plateaus after climbing through the dry, narrow caverns of the Khyber. Here, like an oasis, lie the rich agricultural fields of the Soviet era, once productive, farms lying fallow in the torpid winter sun.
Along the way, young boys, girls and old men, stand beside the road, shovels in hand, disparately filling holes and depressions with their hands and shovels. They fill the air, as much as the road, with dust then standing, arms akimbo, waving frantically for some cash or tokens of appreciation. We wonder who stops to pay them. The occasional truck driver or merciful soul. The road benefits so little from their work. Their efforts appear to be symbolic of the futility that pervades this land.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Sep-01 05:18 AM
A journey into Afghanistan is a journey back, always backwards. Afghanistan seems like a country steeped in the past and without a future, torn into the 21st century by the world around it, not necessarily of it.
Even Pakistan, forever struggling to shed its divisive past and transform itself into a modern, reliable, progressive country, seems comprehensible compared to Afghanistan. Here, beyond the Khyber, time, literally, seems to have stopped. If the man's past still survives, it is here. One begins to wonder: was there ever such a place as a modern Afghanistan?
For here at the start of a new millennium is an ancient land recognized by only three other countries; where no foreign airline flies; where the most renown government ministry is called "Vice and Virtue"; and where most of the people on the inside want to get out.
This is a land where men cannot shave their beards; where music is banned and strings of taped cassettes flutter like warnings from police checkpoints; where kites and kite-flying are outlawed; and, the government cannot decide if girls have the right to go to school. Where have we come to and where are we going?
Afghanistan is a land of vivid and unforgettable contrasts. The dry, hard and burnished land surround isolated valley fields watered by shimmering irrigation canals.
Far above, the barren mountain ridges lie dusted with snow. Below, along the streets, large men in flowing robes with dark, long, curly beards wear cloth turbans above their stern faces. The Taliban casually tote Russian-made kalishnakovs and rocket-propelled guns over their shoulders as they stroll the narrow lanes between mud-caked walls of each family's enclosed compound.
The modern intrudes awkwardly in this ancient land.
Afghan men greet each other as long lost brothers with deep embraces and soulful longing in the eyes. Yet Afghan women must be covered and kept inside so that they are protected from that masculine desire. Afghan women are covered by full 'burkha', a solid robe that flows from head to toe with a knitted screen in front of their faces.
It is a medieval warrior's ethos transported into a protective covering for an obedient woman's countenance. In Afghanistan each gender survives by their armor.
The streets of Kabul bear witness to the most recent impact of the modern. It appears to have been one of unimaginable horror. The seven horsemen of the apocalypse written on stone, brick and concrete.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Sep-01 05:19 AM
Almost forgotten images of Berlin 1945 trouble my mind as we drive down what is described to me as once the Champs Elysees of Kabul. All around lie acres of urban landscape turned into barren, crumpled rubble. Ruins of cars wedged into buildings like they were tossed there by nature's mad fury. Street lamps bent, humbled and twisted into strange shapes. Structures once elegant or modern now pockmarked with gaping holes and burnt by massive projectiles sent crashing into their midst. For miles around only the debris remains here now. Empty, cavernous, quiet.
And yet beside the debris, defying the debris, there is life. The streets are filled with men and children. There is business to be done. Men riding bicycles carrying wood, chickens, household goods and vegetables. Markets have sprung up besides the ruins, local outlets for food, heat and clothing. For the survivors of these twenty years of war life is still full of daily necessities. Even beauty is not forgotten.
On famed Chicken Street, there are flower shops, even if they are only plastic, paper and painted flowers for sale. Next door are grocery stores with imported goods from the Iran and Pakistan. Cultural talismans of the world outside. Clearly, in the midst of a profound destruction and political isolation, man's capacity for trade and opportunity survives.
Everywhere are the Taliban, those "students of Islam" who have taken control of the country. Like scores of invaders before them, they are the occupiers of Moghul Babar's favorite city. But, unlike others before them, who crossed the Hindu Kush in quest of India, these are Afghans.
They are Pushtun, the country's largest tribe and therefore here to stay. Of course, there is much to say against the reactionary Taleban leaders and their militant followers. Much has already been said. They are hard; they are simple; they are unrepentant. They know nothing of the moral, democratic and liberal values of the West. They are uncivilized in our secular and modern ways. They are repressive and unforgiving. They are not what we would choose. In fact, they are not what many Afghans would choose.
But, we are past choosing. We are not here to choose. The armies of a civil war wreaked havoc on this land after the Soviet armies left. When the Soviets departed, hard as it is to believe, Kabul was by and large untouched by the war. The city was recognizable then, it isn't now. When the Russians withdrew, defeated and broken, the Afghan militias, the commanders and the Mujahadeen fought over this city and leveled it.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Sep-01 05:21 AM
For five years they fought over Kabul, firing rockets from every angle into the city against their enemies. There were no caravans coming into the city through the surrounding ridges then, but massive ballistic missiles, built in the West buried in this land between East and West.
Today, at least, the city is relatively silent. The war has receded to the far northern mountains where the Tajik commander, Masood, lies protected in the Panjsher valley and the Northern Alliance secure in mountain redoubts along the Tajikistan border.
It is winter, not the best time for war in the Hindu Kush. Spring will herald the fighting season again when men lift their arms in an annual and futile ritual. The Americans, Russians and their proxy armies have mostly departed. In truth, the fighting is over.
The Taliban control Afghanistan. Outsiders may search endlessly for a better alternative, but war remains the likeliest alternative. If we don't chose war, we must accept the Taliban. Otherwise, there are merely figureheads who simply offer a more benign face to the world outside. Inside Afghanistan Pax Taliban rules.
The fragile peace, at least, offer the opportunity for Save the Children to work. There are children here and women who have been forgotten by the fighting. They endure the natural suffering of the human condition. Hospitals where children are ill and mothers in need of obstetrical care. Homes where children are coughing severely in these winter conditions or suffering the pains of diarrohea from tainted water or food.
The outskirts of the city are still infected with landmines and there are stories, more than one wants to hear, of children who have been killed or maimed by these fragments of war. There is work to be done, here as in so many places in the world.
Our staff live modestly in a house in the middle of the city. It was once an official American home a generation ago when Americans lived in Kabul and their children went to the Kabul International School. Today, the embassy is shuttered and people still remember that the last American ambassador was killed here in 1978.
The rooms of the house are clean and comfortable in a monastic manner. There is a fireplace and a 'bokhara' providing heat through the dripping of gasoline into the metal chamber. Winters are quite cold in Kabul. The city sits at 6,000' and the ridges surrounding the city are only a few thousand feet higher and covered with snow. The sky is clear, that azure cerulean fabric of Central Asia.
Today we are visiting the ruined former Soviet embassy compound. This was a Cold War embassy compound to be proud of. There were apartment blocks, an olympic-sized swimming pool, a movie hall, an outdoor theater, the ambassador's residence (with its own pool), and, reminders of the reality, bullet-proof glass guard rooms at each entrance. However, the occupying Afghan militias were as curious as I am.
They had shattered the bulletproof glass with a series of point-blank shots digging through the layers of physical protection like archeologists in another soil. I feel an odd connection with these young village soldiers who had the same question I did, and the means to find out.
We are here because in this compound the government and UNHCR have placed
over 20,000 internally displaced persons. (IDPs -- they don't say 'refugees' when people are within their own country.) I don't know how many Russians lived in this compound at the height of the Soviet engagement in Afghanistan, but with foreign donors paying for some extra paneling inside and railings outside, there are now tens of thousands of Afghans from the Shomali Plains settled in these apartment blocks. Western money paying to renovate the former Soviet embassy compound to house the homeless from an endless war they once funded to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
Their success is still paying cruel dividends. War creates its own battlefields. It is highly indiscriminate. In over twenty years of warfare, most of Afghanistan has had the opportunity to experience this war. For now, with the only serious rebellion coming from the Panshir Valley to the northeast, the Shamoli Plains north of Kabul have been the scenes of severe fighting. Their villages have served as cover and support for the Masood's tactics causing serious casualties to the Taleban and provoking their wrath. Last year, in an effort to cleanse them of this problem, the Taleban destroyed whole villages and their crops and the people forcibly evacuated from this land.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Sep-01 05:46 AM
After being transported to Jalalabad first, they were then resettled in Kabul in the former Russian embassy compound. Since November, Save the Children, through the support of the State Department and UNICEF, has been providing winter heating fuel to these families, as well as offering school classes, playgrounds and sports facilities to the children. There is no shortage of children.
As we walk around the rough acres of this compound, children twenty individuals surround us deep on all sides. We separate into smaller groups but the children sub-divide and there are still as many children around us as when we had stuck together in larger groups. They see us from their apartment porches and come out running to observe these foreigners in their midst. We are their entertainment -- the Russian movie theater long since shut down and abandoned. Our expressions, our language, our clothing, our unimaginable freedom, all this must be fascinating for an eleven year old Afghan child.
I, too, am fascinated; but by what I'm not sure. I'm not sure if I'm horrified by these living conditions or the sheer numbers of children uprooted from their homes and villages or the power that we outsiders seem to have over their lives. The children watch us, taunt us and laugh amiably to their friends about us.
They are dressed as rag muffins, covered by old caste-off clothes, adult's clothes or a patchwork of western clothes. These are the offspring of a battle gone on too long and with no clear resolution in sight. Maybe that is what offends me. No matter what good we do, these children must live through this ceaseless disaster and find happiness. Man's cruelty and sense of heresy offend me. Adults create a world they force children to live through.
And yet, there is always a yet… We walk among the playgrounds that Save the
Children has built amid these ruins. Here children play and act as children. The landscape is harsh, rough soil beneath their feet, but they smile and swing and whisper to their friends. Behind them, in new uniforms provided by us, older boys are playing volleyball. There is a schedule, coaches and even a referee.
Someone obviously remembers a time before the fighting began when even Afghans played sports and were not afraid of what was buried beneath the land on which they played. It's still bitter cold. I wonder how their hands feel smacking a volleyball when the twigs on the trees could crack by my just looking at them. I look because there are so few trees left in Kabul.
Our guide leads us further on. There is more to see. We walk back toward the entrance of the compound where someone once amused himself by taking target practice at the bulletproof windows. Nearby the Taliban soldiers rest in a vacant building. Their legs loiter out of the windows because like in so much of Kabul, there are none. Next door, there is a school that we are running for the children of these IDPs.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Sep-01 05:48 AM
I'm surprised because as we open the first door there are twenty small girls staring intently at the blackboard learning their Arabic alphabet. The teacher has a kindly look although the same dark, wavy beard and turban as the other Taleb. He is older, thinner and has the concentrated attention of a strict primary school teacher.
But we have disturbed him. The girls turn around to see the guests. There is no fear just curiosity. 'Who are these strangers?' The teacher smiles and the students relax. "Salaam alakum." the teacher says. In a booming harmonious crescendo, the children repeat the expression of greeting. We respond and the class begins anew.
I'm curious, too. I had heard and thought that girls were not allowed to go to school in Afghanistan. What was happening here -- especially under the watchful eye of the young Taleb soldiers lingering around the building next door. They couldn't help but see these girls going off to school each morning. How could this be? Lucienne, the Dutch woman who is our Kabul Program Manager, responded.
"It's not easy, but it's possible. In this case, we have permission from the Ministry of Religious Affairs to conduct these classes. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Education wouldn't give us that permission. It's too sensitive for them. But the Ministry of Religious Affairs granted it to us because these are IDP children and so the classes are only temporary. Of course, we can't be certain when, or if ever, these children will ever go back to the Shamoli Plains, but hopefully, as long as they are here, they can study."
We walk among the classrooms. There is a 'bokhara' burning gasoline in each room. The walls are thin plywood as these buildings, like all the rest, had been battered by the war. The teachers are all men and half the classes boys. As we meander, someone comes to hand out fortified biscuits. They break the packages as they hand them out. I look questioning at Andrew, our Afghanistan Country Director. He says, "If they don't break the wrappings, many of the children will sell these in the market rather than eat them." These children, so eager to earn, so wise in the ways of the world, so alone here in a city most of the world has forgotten. I feel I am in this world and far away; I hear the echo of Yeats' poem "Among Schoolchildren" as I observe the children's eager, charming faces.
I think again of that immense stupa in the Khyber Pass as I entered Afghanistan a few days before, an artifact from a world fifteen hundred years ago when the teachings of the Buddha were cloistered in these valleys. I dream, too, of Gandhara, a civilization so ancient that it was closer in time to the Athens of Pericles than the Moghuls who founded Kabul. I remember Kandahar, where Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taleban now resides -- the original home of the Gandharan culture. From that distant past, I conjure those famous Gandharan Buddhist statues, renown for their fine facial beauty and revealing robes. I recall Yeats' voice calling on Phidias's lineaments to shape our human sense of beauty. That Grecian measure of man was formed at a time when Alexander reached the Indus. I wonder: did the mind that shaped those images shape these?
Southwest Asia forever intrigues me. For my work I travel widely across the Asian continent from Vietnam through Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan to Afghanistan. There is something that changes as one moves west across Asia. It's not just that the power of Islam is firmer and more explicit in these lands closer to the arc of the crescent. It's also that the landscape changes as one crosses the Indus.
The semi-tropical rice fields of the Gangetic plains, the Mekong and the tropical isles turn dry and desert. Once one rises out of the Indus valley toward the Near East the landscape changes permanently. As do the eyes of the children. In Southeast and South Asia, they are brown, chocolate and dark like the swollen rivers in the monsoon. Here, as one travels up to the high plateaus of Afghanistan, the eyes of the children change. As I look around the classroom, they stare back, confidently; with the turquoise, emerald and lapis lazuli looks of a world an Aegean away.
(The writer Keith Leslie lives and works in Kathmandu, Nepal. He wrote this article in February 2000, when the statues of the Bamiyan Buddhas were still standing up in Afganistan.)
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