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A Nation of Stubborn Survivors

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Again, there was the thunder of the guns. Mumtaz Mokhbeg, his wife, Marina, and their five children hastily abandoned their humble mud-brick house, leaving behind grapes on the arbor ready for harvest.

Bearing all they could carry--a battered kettle, crockery, bedding--the family set off on foot one morning this autumn on the Salang highway toward Kabul, the capital, 2 1/2 hours away. It was the fifth time that the 30-year-old police officer and his family had been forced to change homes since fighting spread throughout this Asian country at the close of the 1970s.

“Tell the world what bad shape we’re in,” Mokhbeg, who headed the wretched little parade, urged an American he met on the road as his children bawled at the din made by tank cannon and rocket barrages, and his wife, clad in an ankle-length gray shroud that masked her face and body, tried to comfort them. “I ask them to stop the fighting in Afghanistan, for the love of God.”

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In a desolate, bleakly beautiful land that always has been counted among the world’s poorest nations, 17 years of unremitting warfare have brought appalling havoc to the population, industry, agriculture, historical monuments, public health and education systems--indeed, to every facet of life.

Few nations in modern times have seen the level of death and destruction that Afghanistan has borne.

Seventy percent of Kabul, a proud and ancient city that now is home to an estimated 900,000 to 1.2 million people, has been laid to waste.

“That’s three times, at the very least, the level of devastation suffered by Sarajevo,” the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, said Greg Wilson, an urban planner with the U.N. Center for Human Settlements. “For destruction on this scale, you have to go back to the Second World War--Dresden, for example.”

And no end to the agony is in sight as the Taliban Islamic militia, which now controls most of Afghanistan, continues to battle a well-armed alliance of its foes.

The Afghan people, although decimated in their numbers, have stubbornly survived the holocaust inflicted from within and, during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation and the U.S.-supported Islamic uprising that opposed it, from without. But existence for millions has come to mean sustenance on bread and tea, sleeping in family-sized huddles under threadbare blankets for want of fuel to heat their dwellings, begging in the streets and selling heirlooms for food and shelter.

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From the people who would be their masters, most Afghans expect little. The Taliban--which ousted a shaky but less fundamentalist coalition of Muslim militias--has brought most of its subjects greater peace but done next to nothing to improve the nasty and brutish lot of millions. In Herat, the major city in the west, the Talibs’ most visible accomplishment to date has been to paint three mosques.

“Since the Taliban has come, there is nothing for us: no salary, no food and no way to escape,” said a clerk in the Ministry of Provincial Development, the father of three daughters. Like most civil servants in the capital, he has not been paid his monthly salary of about $6.50 since the turbaned militiamen marched into Kabul in late September.

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How do Afghans manage in such conditions?

One answer lies in the largely tribal and clannish nature of Afghan society. Here, many of the destitute are able to call upon a network of extended family and inter-family loyalties for aid or lodging. Some get badly needed food from relatives in the countryside, less affected by the war than the cities, or cash from overseas Afghans channeled through money changers in neighboring Pakistan.

“If an Afghan sees a relative has no food or money, he will help,” explained Sher Ahmed, 39, a coughing, cadaverous driver in Kabul who had not been paid by his employer, the state tourism company Afghantour, for six months. To buy his six children something to eat, Ahmed had been borrowing money from his brother-in-law and recently sold a rug in the bazaar.

In Kabul’s stark ruins, hordes of children--12,000 by one international organization’s estimate--paw each day through the shattered bricks and masonry in search of scrap metal that can be sold.

The small scavengers risk being maimed or killed by mines or unexploded rockets and shells. But for some families, the 35 cents a son or daughter can earn for a sackful of scrap is the critical margin between eating and going hungry that day.

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“Only God helps us now. If we didn’t have to do this to live, why would we?” asked Sabza Gul, 40, as she picked through the ruins in western Kabul with her daughter Latifa, 9, who struggled under the weight of a jute bag filled with gnarled junk.

According to Afghan government sources, between 1.2 million and 2 million people--a tenth or so of this country’s prewar population of 15.5 million--have been killed over the last 17 years. Another 1.5 million were so badly injured that they are permanently disabled. No fewer than 50,000 Afghans have lost one or both legs to mines.

“Everybody in Afghanistan has a wound,” Khan Gul, 58, a carpenter from Bagram, told a visiting American. Lifting his pant leg, the white-bearded man revealed two gouges on his right ankle left by a mine burst.

More than 2 million Afghans who fled the fighting still live outside the country. And inside Afghanistan, there are 500,000 refugees.

Since the Talibs captured Kabul, about 150,000 people have left the city, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates. Some Afghans have been on the move a dozen times or more.

War has made 500,000 to 800,000 Afghan women widows and has deprived 1 million children of their fathers--an especially cruel blow in a traditionally patriarchal society.

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Under the Taliban, the situation of these widows and of the fatherless families they head has become even more precarious, since the militia’s mullahs have decreed that women should not leave home unless absolutely necessary.

Morning and afternoon, Kuku Gul, 35, who lost her husband four years ago during fighting in Kabul, wanders about seeking handfuls of rice, crusts of bread and other offerings for herself and her five children. She was employed at a government tea house but is uncertain of ever returning to her job.

“If the Taliban doesn’t let us work, what can I do?” she asked. “I can only beg.”

Other widows are so destitute that they cannot afford the head-to-ankle garment, called a burka, that Kuku Gul wears and that the Talibs require of women venturing outside their home.

“If these women go out without one, they may be beaten,” said an employee of an international relief organization assisting Kabul’s 50,000 widows.

The damage to the country has been almost indescribable.

Over the years, 25,000 villages were destroyed or severely damaged, and 2,000 school buildings were leveled. In Kabul, roads need repair. Virtually all cabling, poles and other components of the city’s electrical system have been ruined. The trolley-bus network was damaged beyond repair four years ago.

“There are no roads, hospitals or schools. The country is slowly reverting to 1,000 years ago,” said Ross Everson, Kabul coordinator for the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, an umbrella group of more than 70 foreign aid agencies.

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In rural areas, the Agricultural Survey of Afghanistan estimates, between one-quarter and one-third of the irrigation systems have been destroyed or have collapsed because of neglect. Much fertile land is too dangerous to farm because of mines.

According to the U.N. World Food Program, crop production has plunged to half its prewar level, and Afghanistan will need 1.3 million tons more wheat than it grows this year.

The average Afghan has a caloric intake equal to less than a pound of bread a day. Relief needs are so critical that the U.N. program expects to have to feed one in five Kabulis this year.

Since fighting began, 500,000 acres of woodland, including valuable pistachio forests, have been destroyed or cut down by Afghans desperately seeking firewood, according to one survey. More than 9 million head of cattle and sheep have been killed or have died, including many karakul sheep, whose lambskin is particularly prized.

“In Afghanistan, we have had more than 100 times the ecosystem destruction that occurred in Vietnam” during the Vietnam War, said Amir S. Hassanyar, the chancellor of Kabul University who holds a doctorate in natural resource ecology. “Catastrophe when applied to Afghanistan is a mild word.”

Most of Kabul’s factories, which produced goods ranging from shoes to carpets, are battle-scarred, forlorn hulks, leaving thousands of families without a source of income.

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With the demise of a national government, the public health system also collapsed. Of the 320 health centers that functioned throughout Afghanistan, only 77 remain. In some areas, malaria, rabies, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, polio and other diseases are reportedly on the rise, despite the efforts of foreign relief agencies and the Afghan Red Crescent Society.

“There has been a total disintegration of everything: There are no jobs, no education--nothing,” said Alberto Cairo, an Italian physiotherapist who heads a Kabul clinic and workshop making artificial limbs for mine victims. “I stopped asking myself long ago how these people survive, because there is no way.”

Yet Afghans do survive, by reducing their needs to near-zero, swallowing their fierce pride to borrow from those more fortunate and accepting subsidized bread or a wheat-for-jobs program from an international aid agency, even as they tap the family and clan networks that have proved more durable than the machinery of the nation-state established in Afghanistan after World War I.

The countryside, always the dominant factor in Afghan life and still home to the vast majority of people, has also proved remarkably resilient, bouncing back in the Panjsher valley and other locales from the devastation wrought by Soviet aerial bombing raids in the 1980s. Today, most villages manage to feed themselves, and many send surplus--from pomegranates to sheep--to the cities for sale.

It is in Afghanistan’s urban areas, especially the capital, where life has been savaged the most. One of the most impoverished neighborhoods in Kabul’s Old City was once pounded daily by shells and rockets as the forces of enemy militia commanders made war on each other. It now is home to 1,110 families struggling to get by for one more day.

“This is my life. See what bad luck I have had,” said Mohammed Ashraf, 47, who ekes out a living selling biscuits and cigarettes on credit to poor residents from a small metal shed on stilts.

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On a good day, the former wrestler and coach, who now is gaunt and hollow-eyed, will clear about 18 cents in profit, which must be stretched to feed a family of seven.

“When we have tea, there is no sugar. If we buy sugar, there is no bread,” said his wife, Ghulalai, 35, whose hair has turned gray.

During the first cold snap of the season, three of the couple’s five children became sick.

“There is nothing to buy medicine with. We use aspirin--nothing more,” Ashraf said.

Looters made off with the doors and windows of their tumbledown, two-room dwelling, so the family sleeps together on the floor under thin blankets. Unable to afford wood, which costs about 2 cents a pound, the Ashrafs cook on a feeble fire of cloth scraps in an open-air courtyard.

“I don’t know when this poverty will stop,” Ghulalai said. “We feel like we are losing our minds.”

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But if millions of Afghans are surviving, their country--in the words of Barnett R. Rubin, an American who is one of the deans of international scholarship on Afghanistan--has become a “failed state.”

A founding member of the United Nations, a much-wooed buffer state before and during the Cold War, Afghanistan is now largely an amalgam of war victims, widows, orphans, beggars, refugees and poor who have seen most of the fruits of half a century of development efforts pounded into the hard earth.

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“We are thinking about the future of our poor country,” said a 28-year-old former student at Kabul University, which is closed and faces an uncertain future under the Taliban. “We knew we were already 30, 50 years behind other countries. Now, we are looking for a piece of firewood or fruit while other countries are working with computers.”

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