Work to Root Out a Buried Foe Gains Urgency in Afghanistan

Twenty-three years of bloody conflict seemed mercifully over when a busload of refugees from this village an hour’s drive north of the Afghan capital happily lumbered toward the homes they hadn’t seen for as long as a decade.

So eager were the passengers to reach the ruined village that, only a few miles from their destination, the driver pulled off the main road to cut the final corner of their long journey.

Then the bus drove over an antitank mine, blasting the vehicle into a twisted wreck and killing all 17 people on board.

That Nov. 17 tragedy on the brink of a joyful homecoming was a poignant reminder for Afghans that the wars that have plagued them for a generation may be over, but the killing has yet to stop.

War’s deadly curtain call, the land mines lacing the ochre fields and rutted roads across this agonized country, kill or maim at least 20 people every day and are keeping millions from returning to their homes and fields despite the long-awaited peace now prevailing.

International humanitarian aid agencies trying to help Afghanistan recover recognize this buried danger as the single most daunting barrier to the return of normal life here. Fields are too dangerous for farmers to plant the crops that could feed them, and the few orchards and vineyards that survived years of carpet-bombing contain forbidden fruit that could blast hundreds of people and animals to their deaths.

“As soon as the Taliban left, people started returning despite the mine hazards. This is happening all over the plains, which is why we have to make this agricultural region a priority,” explains Ahmad Nasir, head of the explosive ordnance demolition teams for the HALO Trust, the Hazardous Area Life-Support Organization.

The largest of several such nongovernmental operations at work under United Nations auspices, HALO has 1,200 de-miners and has been at work since 1988 locating and destroying 100,000 pieces of unexploded weaponry in Afghanistan each year. But with the U.N. estimating that 5 million to 10 million mines have been buried in Afghanistan by successive waves of combatants over the past two decades, making this land safe for peace could take a lifetime.

HALO is concentrating its resources on clearing the eight most strategic and heavily mined of Afghanistan’s 30 provinces, a job that project director Tom Dibb estimates will take about eight years if additional funding to expand and accelerate the current, $3.5-million annual program is forthcoming.

Because Afghanistan was at war for almost a quarter of a century, first against Soviet occupiers and then among the rival local factions that tried to take power after Moscow’s retreat, the country has plenty of former military sappers who need only a couple of weeks’ training to handle a de-mining job.

The pay is $105 a month for a six-day workweek and omnipresent danger, but the foreign-funded organizations working to free Afghanistan from its buried terror nonetheless have little problem finding willing and able employees. With the vast majority of Afghans out of work and per capita income averaging only $4 a month, the jobs provide a relatively good living by local standards along with the fringe benefit of doing something that helps heal a society devastated by war and destruction.

“This is my country, and I am working for my people,” explains Rahimullah, a 32-year-old team leader painstakingly clearing the roadside between here and the next village, Qalaynasroo, one narrow strip at a time. “We want to make it safe for people to come back to their homes. So many are still waiting in Pakistan and Iran just dreaming of the day they can see this place again.”

Residents Who Fled Eager to Return Home

Some who fled this area are too impatient to wait for their roads and fields to be cleared--a process expected to take up to 18 months as teams work outward from major roads through the residential areas and only later in the vast fields and desolate orchards.

Abdul Shaker and his brother Momtaz made the foray here on foot from nearby Charikar last week to see what could be salvaged from their mud-walled home. Having found several wooden support beams still usable and one wall intact enough to support a lean-to, the brothers set up camp in the ruins of their homestead to begin the long work of making it habitable for the rest of their extended family, still sheltering with relatives in Iran.

This village on the pulverized Shomali plain, where front lines in the successive wars moved often and the mine-layers were quick to follow, has become a de facto priority for the de-miners because it is near Bagram air base and must be freed of mines to allow aid and diplomacy to safely shuttle between here and the capital, Kabul.

The plain, once a rich expanse of wheat and fruit trees, was a favorite field for sowing the cruel seeds of delayed warfare because it flanks the main road from Kabul to the key northern cities of Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif. Incessant bombing of the plain throughout the last decade has reduced the region to rubble, with hardly a wall left standing higher than 3 feet and not a single roof intact.

Still, refugees returning to rebuild their homes or simply assess how big that job will be lumber along the bomb-blasted roads throughout the daylight hours, many carrying their few belongings in bundles on their shoulders or sacks on their heads.

Eighteen-year-old Abeda knows the cost of trying to live in a minefield. Her husband was blown to pieces in their wheat field when he trod on a mine two years ago, leaving her with two babies, his aged mother and not even a roof over their heads. Illiterate because of the Taliban ban on education for girls and unable to work because of the Islamic regime’s repressive edicts, she has been supporting her family by walking four miles each day to the main highway to beg passing motorists for money to buy bread.

Number of De-Miners Expected to Multiply

It is the desperation of the widows and war-weary farmers to again till the soil of this erstwhile breadbasket that motivates Afghanistan’s army of de-miners, who already number nearly 5,000 and are expected to rapidly multiply now that the world’s attention is on this nation’s postwar plight.

Along the seven-mile road that skirts Dasht-i-Rabat and links the old and new roads to Kabul from Bagram, dozens of men in flak jackets and clear protective visors sit cross-legged in the powdery beige dirt, slowly scanning 2-inch strips of ground with metal detectors. The strip of dirt is then carefully scraped away unless the detector emits telltale crackling, in which case the de-miner gingerly pokes the suspect area with almost horizontal piercings with a thin rod. Most mines are planted with their detonators facing up so as to catch a human foot or a car tire, Nasir explains.

The majority of the mines menacing rural Afghans are crude metal devices scattered by the Soviets during their 10-year occupation and bloody struggle against resistance fighters armed and supported by the United States in the superpower proxy war.

More sophisticated Italian antitank mines using plastic explosives are the de-miners’ worst nightmare, Dibb says, because they are undetectable with the metal probes and are often buried too deep to be picked up by the manual sweeps. Only when heavy vehicles like the ill-fated busload of returning refugees apply enough pressure on the detonators are the mines set into deadly motion.

Unexploded Bomblets Add to the Peril

De-mining was suspended here when the U.S. airstrikes against Taliban forces began Oct. 7, but it resumed a day after Northern Alliance fighters swept victoriously into Kabul on Nov. 13 behind the fleeing Taliban. The job grew more difficult, though, because thousands of unexploded bomblets from U.S. cluster bombs have been added to the lethal elements on the landscape.

More than 600 cluster bombs with 202 explosive components each fell on the moving front line during the five weeks that U.S. warplanes pounded the Taliban forces here and along their southern retreat, Dibb estimates. With the bomblets having at least a 10% failure rate, according to experts with humanitarian relief organizations, that leaves more than 12,000 unexploded bomblets on top of the ubiquitous land mines.

At nearby Bagram--which is being used by U.S. and British forces as well as the United Nations and an initial array of foreign military and charter aircraft--de-mining and collection of unexploded cluster bomblets have been a priority since the Western soldiers began arriving in late October. Explosions, both controlled and accidentally set off by small animals and roaming livestock, echo throughout the mountain-ringed airfield, and clouds of cordite-laced dust rise every few minutes into the clear winter air.

U.S. forces deployed around Afghanistan’s second-largest city, Kandahar, are also busy clearing mines from the airport to open another corridor for desperately needed food aid. Three U.S. Marines were injured this month when one of them accidentally stepped on a mine at the airport.

But the answer to feeding Afghanistan’s hungry masses is clearing the farmland they are eager to plant, those supervising the de-mining say.

Although Afghanistan’s bountiful harvest of mines makes the work more hazardous here than in any other country, Dibb contends that the job of getting rid of them is not insurmountable and could be achieved within five years if sufficient funding and attention were provided.