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October
13, 2001
Alexander
Cockburn
War
Can't Save the Economy
October
12, 2001
Imran
Khan
Try
Them in Court
Vijay
Prashad
War
in a Passive Voice
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombing
the Taliban
October
11, 2001
David
Vest
Bob
Dylan and 9/11
Amb.
Edward Peck
Bush
War Plan "Dumb"
Hani
Shukrallah
West
Is As West Does
Patrick
Cockburn
Looming
Humanitarian Crisis
October
10, 2001
Tom
Turnipseed
Earth
is Our "Homeland"
Steve
Perry
What
Is To Be Done?
Simon
Jenkins
The
Dumbest Weapon
Tariq
Ali
The
Pakistan Maelstrom
Cockburn/St.
Clair
The
Empire Strikes Back
October
9, 2001
David
Vest
The
Rout That Wasn't
Michael
Mandel
This
War Is Illegal
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombs
Weaken Taliban
Lenni
Brenner
Powell
the Owl
Zha
Marginalization
and Terror
Steve
Perry
It
Begins
October
8, 2001
Zbigniew
Brzezinski
How
Jimmy Carter and
I Started the Muj
Philip Agee
The
USA and Terrorism
Mahajan
and Jensen
A
War of Lies
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance
Builds an Airport
October
7, 2001
John Pilger
Hitchens'
Slurs
Tariq
Ali
Who
Said History
Stopped Being Ironical?
October
6, 2001
Vijay
Prashad
US
War Aims
Kevin
Gray
The
Trap:
Blacks and 9/11
October
5, 2001
Ronnie
Gilbert
Déjà
Vu: The FBI's War
on Civil Liberties
Patrick
Cockburn
Taliban
Cluster Bombs
Dave
Marsh
John
Brown, Woody Guthrie
and the Secret Music of 9/11
Babak
Nahid
A
Suspect's Perspective
October
4, 2001
David
Vest
Send
in the Cons
Robin
Blackburn
Road
to Armageddon
Noam
Chomsky
Chatting
with Chomsky
Tony
Blair
The
Dossier on bin Laden
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Five
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Seattle and Beyond
By
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Civil Liberties
Ridge Long Groomed
for
Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids
Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
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A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
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October 13,
2001
In Afghanistan
War is only a secondary
concern in
a village that keeps being invaded
By Patrick Cockburn
in Panjshir
valley
The Independent
It is a strange battlefield. The front
line cuts across the green Shomali plain, one of the most fertile
parts of Afghanistan, its fields fed by the rivers flowing out
of the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains.
Here, amid the close-packed
mud-brick villages, home to 800,000 people, the Taliban and the
opposition Northern Alliance have repeatedly fought bloody battles
over the past five years as each, in turn, advanced and retreated
across the plain.
The signs of war are everywhere.
Beside the road are the rusting carcasses of old tanks. The main
bridges on the road to Kabul have been blown up by one side or
the other. The metal bridge, replacing the old one, in the town
of Jabal Saraj must be the only bridge in the world to rest on
buttresses made out of crumpled armoured personnel carriers.
"Our village has been
captured by the Taliban four times and then recaptured by us,"
said Mohammed Akbar, a local mujahedin commander in Khalay Malek,
a poor village even by the standards of the Shomali. Its tumble-down
mud-brick houses looked as if they were melting into the landscape.
Mr Akbar, an energetic, cheerful
looking man, was drawing water from a deep well. He explained
that the 40 families who live in Khalay Malek faced problems
other than war. He pointed at the village pool a few yards away
which was completely dry. "There has been no water in it
for five years," he said. "Before that it was always
full. Our worst problem is lack of water."
He added that the problem was
the drought the worst for half a century in central Asia
and the damage caused by the Taliban three years ago when
they captured almost all of the Shomali. They were forced to
retreat with heavy losses but, before doing so, dynamited two
enormous concrete pipes feeding the main irrigation canal at
Totom Dara.
The people of the Shomali
today some 500,000 are under the control of the Northern Alliance
and 300,000 live in territory held by the Taliban were
always poor.
"Some 80 per cent of the
children here are malnourished," said Dr Mirzon Mohammed,
who runs a health centre at Kapisa. "Farmers' incomes have
fallen so far that they cannot get enough food and are vulnerable
to disease."
It is difficult, just by looking
at people, to know if they are getting enough to eat. At Totum
Dara, where the concrete pipes are being repaired, several dozen
excited children surrounded our pick-up truck. We asked them
what they ate during a normal day.
A 12-year-old boy called Hamid,
who seemed less shy than the others, said: "I have tea and
bread in the morning, rice at lunch and meat in the evening."
As soon as he mentioned that his family ate meat once a day all
the other children laughed loudly and shouted: "He is a
liar! It's not true!"
It is possible to find water
in the Shomali. "You have to dig down about 25 metres,"
Sardar Agha, a farmer pushing a wheelbarrow, told us. "It
takes about three people and six days' work. You can drink the
water but there is not enough to irrigate the fields."
But, even for farmers who have
enough land and the water to irrigate it, there are hidden dangers.
They lie just under the soil in the shape of anti-personnel mines
shaped like over-sized mushrooms. Both sides have sown then liberally
around Bagram village.
Dr Ata Mohammed, who gives
first aid to war wounded, said: "About 15 out of every hundred
people we treat have mine injuries." In every street there
are men on crutches with only one leg. In Afghanistan as a whole,
300 people are killed or wounded by mines every month.
We had gone to Bagram to seek
further information about three people who had stepped on mines
earlier in the week. We had been told that one had been killed
and two friends had lost their legs when they had tried to rescue
him.
It turned to be a little more
complicated than that. Bagram is known for its good grapes. A
26-year-old man called Sayid Akbar had gone to pick some for
himself late at night. He stepped on a mine which blew off his
leg. Two of his relatives, Mohammed Yusuf, 50, and Nasser Khan,
60, braved the mines to drag him to safety and take him to hospital.
They succeeded but, possibly
over-confident, they went back to look at the site of the explosion
the next day. Mr Yusuf stepped on another mine and lost a leg
while Mr Khan was killed.
'It's
hard for us, but the villagers
live in medieval poverty'
Conditions here in a small
village in Afghanistan's Panjshir valley, at the foothills of
the Hindu Kush about 40 miles north of Kabul, are atrocious.
But after three weeks, we have settled in to an odd sort of routine.
I arrived as one of a small
group, given lodgings in an official "guest house"
run by the opposition Northern Alliance. But with 200 foreign
correspondents now crammed into the village, the overcrowding
is severe. We are billeted in the former home of the manager
of a local cement factory.
Initially we had two lavatories
between 15 people. Now we are down to one for 45. And the Afghan
definition of a lavatory is not yours or mine: it is little more
than a hole in the ground.
Four of us share a room; we
sleep on the floor with a cushion and a blanket. I found a carpenter
to make me a small table to work on.
But if conditions are testing
for us, the villagers live in conditions of medieval poverty
and hardship. The village, with a population of about 2,000,
has only a few tiny shops, one selling second-hand women's shoes
from Europe and Pakistan.
There are so few things to
be bought and so many hundred dollar bills in circulation, thanks
to the international media influx, that the value of the dollar
to the Afghani has halved locally in the past three weeks.
Donkey is the main form of
transport and for taxis people rely on horses and carts.
We have electricity only between
3pm and 9pm and the generator is unreliable. Daylight ends at
six and now, with winter not far off, it is getting cold. The
dust storms are frequent and blinding and play havoc with our
equipment.
At least I managed to buy two
car batteries in the village to run my satellite phone for a
few minutes every day so I can send my copy.
Dysentery is a constant hazard.
You get it from the water or eating the vegetables. One of my
colleagues was struck down the other day and I took him to the
nearest hospital. Then I got the symptoms myself.
I get up at 6am to get to the
washroom and lavatory before everyone else.
The only restaurant in the
village also serves as a hotel. After the evening meal, people
settle down on the low carpeted tables to sleep for the night.
These days a lot of the customers are fighters carrying sub-machine-guns.
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