The Final Humiliation: Afghan Children Are Ignored

Mazar Uddin is a 6-year-old with a head of dusty hair who was deposited at the Alla Auddin Orphanage more than a year ago. His mother, a young widow, left him at the rundown compound in the war-ravaged Afghan capital because she could no longer afford to keep her four sons, especially those who couldn’t work. Uddin, the youngest, was the first to go.

Alla Auddin is the only refuge for children in Kabul. It may also be the world’s only orphanage where most children have at least one living parent. But poverty is rampant in Kabul: Up to 70% are unemployed, and a mid-level civil-service job pays about $10 a month. Alla Auddin has been so overwhelmed with orphans, nearing 800 and counting, that it had to move Uddin and more than half the younger ones into a renovated compound in the ruined half of the city.

“Renovated” is a relative word in Afghanistan, however. Uddin shares a bed and filthy blanket with a larger boy in a small room with 38 other orphans. A putrid stench in the hallways comes from bathrooms without running water, because the vintage generator that powers lights and water pumps recently broke down. Medicine is too expensive, so waves of maladies sweep through the concrete-floor wards; one child recently died of measles. Meals consist of bread and tea for breakfast, rice for both lunch and dinner; dried milk once provided by a foreign charity is long gone. When asked what the kids do to play, Uddin replied with his own question, “What’s a toy?”

Alla Auddin is a microcosm of Afghanistan after a generation of conflict: abandoned, primitive, fending for itself against numbing odds. A second generation is on the verge of being lost: Tens of thousands of Afghan children are doomed because virtually no one with the power or means to help has even bothered to notice.

Children kept by their families aren’t so lucky, either. Under the searing Central Asian sun, kids as young as 5 spend their days throwing dirt in rocky abysses along the axle-tearing, muffler-busting, windshield-cracking road to Kabul. The 110-mile stretch takes more than six hours to traverse. Kids hope drivers will toss out a few afghans, a small fraction of a cent since the afghani recently plummeted to 75,000 to the U.S. dollar, in gratitude for their efforts. Few do. Other children flog old Pepsi cans filled with water from the muddy Kabul River to travelers stopping at checkpoints. In Kabul, nearly 30,000 kids are estimated to survive by brazenly begging or scavenging through garbage and war ruins.

Afghanistan is going back in time, and Afghan warlords aren’t the only ones to blame. Once their Cold War rivalry ended, both superpowers simply packed up and left the country to the monsters and the monstrous conditions they helped create. The United States bears as much responsibility as the Soviet Union for this nation’s unraveling.

Politically, most of Afghanistan is controlled by semiliterate and narrow-minded religious students of the Taliban who were educated in Pakistani madrassas, or religious schools, in the 1980s, a time when Islamic zealots were seen by the U.S., Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as the force to counter communism in Central Asia.

Widely welcomed when they captured Kabul in 1996, the Taliban have since failed abysmally to improve life on any front. Life is far more repressive than during the Soviet occupation, with ruthless religious police in souped-up pickups patrolling for shopkeepers who don’t close down during prayers, curfew breakers, women with improper dress or girls attempting to go to secret schools since female education is banned.

But the opposition is no better. The Taliban emerged in the mid-1990s because the diverse moujahedeen factions who forced the Soviet retreat in 1989 went to war among themselves. The Soviets left the capital intact. The moujahedeen came in and destroyed it, leaving behind mines in homes and public buildings that still kill civilians, including scavenging children.

After the Taliban ran them out, some moujahedeen factions regrouped in the Northern Alliance that now controls 10% of the country. The latest spring offensive signals their determination to return, but few Afghans believe the alliance will hold together in the unlikely event it should retake Kabul.

The bottom line is that neither the Taliban nor the Northern Alliance represents hope for either peace or stability.

Problems are not only political. Economically, Afghanistan is the world’s foremost outlaw state. Its largest source of income is from poppy fields that produce more opium than all the world’s other countries combined. The vast fields in the Afghan lowlands, easily visible this time of year by the distinctive flowering pink buds and the bulbous heads filled with opium sap, are now under cultivation.

Farmers are not the real culprit; poverty is. Farmers interviewed expressed a strong desire to switch crops. Heroin is not widely used in Afghanistan. But like coca farmers in Latin America, nothing else is anywhere near as profitable, though profits for them aren’t all that great. Partly because of a severe drought and poor quality, the going price is $30 a kilo, a fraction of the $100,000-$500,000 price on the streets for processed heroin in the United States or Europe.

“Why don’t the Americans help us build other industries? They complain about narcotics from Afghanistan, but they don’t help find alternatives,” complained Gul Khan, an aging farmer and father of 10 children in the village of Sir Shahi near Jalalabad. “I have no choice if I want to feed my children.”

The second main source of income in Afghanistan is smuggling between Pakistan, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. A World Bank study estimated that trade to be worth as much as $2 billion.

Yet, neither illicit industry has done much for most Afghans. So, despite stiff Islamic penalties imposed for theft, including hand amputations, Afghanistan’s deteriorating economy has spawned a crime wave.

Afghanistan has to be almost totally reconstructed, right down to the Kabul Zoo, which once marked the war’s front line and is now the only source of public entertainment for children since sports are virtually nonexistent and theater, movies, television, music and videos are banned. The zoo is almost barren since the elephant and two tigers died of shrapnel wounds, and the reptile house was blown up in the early 1990s. Marjan, the aging lone lion, lost an eye when attacked . Like two mangy monkeys, the few other animals appear emaciated and slightly crazed.

“Where else do I take my children?” a father of two small boys asked while wandering among the empty stalls last Sunday.

The fate of Afghanistan’s children is trapped by a final tragic irony. The U.S. approved sanctions against Afghanistan for supporting terrorism, most notably for harboring Saudi renegade Osama Bin Laden, who is linked to the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and other extremist spectaculars. The irony is that the United States gratefully backed the Arab zealots Bin Laden recruited in the 1980s to fight alongside the moujahedeen.

Last year, the United States convinced the United Nations to impose sanctions, too. Humanitarian goods--food, medicine, educational material and basic essentials--are technically exempt, as in Iraq. But the aura around Afghanistan, promoted foremost by the United States, now makes it a place where few want to get involved, even if only to help the children. *