Afghans Teeter on Edge

With hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees already on the move, food supplies in their nation running out and winter just weeks away, U.S. military action against Afghanistan could lead to mass starvation, aid agencies warned Sunday.

The U.N. refugee agency estimated that by Saturday as many as 300,000 Afghans had fled the southeastern city of Kandahar, the ruling Taliban movement’s spiritual capital and a presumed target of any airstrikes in retaliation for last week’s terrorist attacks in the United States.

“That means up to half the city’s population has already left, more are following, and the mass exodus is spreading across the country as refugees head toward Iran and Pakistan,” said Yousaf Hassan, a senior official in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, with the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Even before last week’s attacks in the United States, conditions in the Central Asian nation were severe. A recent U.N. report declared that 6 million Afghans--one in every four citizens--is at risk of death because of armed conflict, drought or chronic poverty.

“We’re talking about a huge catastrophe in the making,” said Andrew Wilder, field office director of the nonprofit agency Save the Children’s $6-million aid program for Afghans.

Afghanistan has become the focus of a possible U.S. reprisal because it has provided shelter since 1996 for Osama bin Laden, seen by American officials as a prime suspect in last week’s events in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania.

Witnesses reported today that Taliban officials have begun to flee Kabul, the capital, in anticipation of U.S. attacks on Afghanistan, Reuters reported. Junior Taliban commanders and their families were seen heading out of the city for the countryside.

Just how Afghanistan has fallen from a model developing country to the brink of chaos over the space of three decades is a depressing story of intrigue, invasion, civil war, international isolation and neglect on the part of its inexperienced leaders. A three-year drought--the worst in living memory--and the country’s link to Bin Laden threaten to push a once-proud people over the edge.

As the U.S. embarks on its global hunt for terrorists, Afghanistan looms as a crucial early test of whether America will be able to defeat elusive enemies without declaring war on an entire people.

Westerners who worked in Afghanistan until recently claim that despite the Taliban’s virulent anti-Americanism, many Afghans have a positive view of the United States. Although probably more a measure of their current despair than political sympathies, some are even said to view the idea of U.S. intervention as a potential glimmer of hope for a better future.

But as talk grows of possible U.S. strikes, security specialists warn that attacks launched to create a short-term “feel-good factor” at home could undercut U.S. efforts in the long run if they inflict heavy civilian casualties.

“The question is how to protect innocent civilians, who are probably the only people to suffer more at the hands of the Taliban than Americans,” said an international aid worker who declined to be identified by name or organization. “There is a real danger that once the United States takes an active [military] role, it will be seen as responsible for what happens there.”

At present, the plight of ordinary Afghans is desperate.

At Jalozai refugee camp in western Pakistan, at least 80,000 Afghans have made it to relative safety and live amid the haze of sun-blasted dust. They are housed in canvas tents and makeshift shelters of old sacks or carpets propped up on bamboo poles and anchored with stones. Even as summer gives way to fall, the midday heat is blinding.

A group of about 100 refugees took eight days to reach Pakistan from Nehreen district in the northern Afghan province of Baghlan. The group arrived in Jalozai on Tuesday.

Jura Baz Mohammed, who guesses his own age to be about 50, fled with his wife and their seven children, ages 1 to 15. Their house was destroyed in shelling across the front line between the Taliban regime, which controls 95% of Afghanistan, and opposition forces, which hold a sliver of territory.

“In our village, six or seven people were killed and about 12 injured,” Gul Mohammed, 36, said through an interpreter. “So we had to leave.”

The Jalozai camp has no electricity, so the refugees haven’t seen the horrifying videotaped images of airliners crashing into the World Trade Center’s twin towers. But they have stayed close to their radios and know what is likely to come next and why.

In the camps here and in Afghanistan, conditions are likely to get worse.

The abject failure of the Taliban government to ensure the availability of food and basic health services has left millions of Afghans dependent on international aid for their survival.

Ironically, the U.S. is the biggest single donor, providing $80 million of the $140 million in annual U.N. humanitarian assistance.

International aid workers, as many as 300 strong before last Tuesday, are gone. After a Taliban announcement that it could not guarantee the safety of foreigners in the event of any U.S. retaliatory attack, the last relief workers departed Sunday for Islamabad. Eight Westerners jailed last month for allegedly seeking to convert Muslims to Christianity remain.

“Now is the time they should be preparing for winter,” said Wilder, the Save the Children director, about relief efforts. “Either food gets into remote areas now or internal refugees face starvation.”

Although local Afghan staff from international aid groups can keep feeding the roughly 3 million people who depend on handouts for daily meals, supplies will run out quickly.

“There isn’t more than three weeks of food left in the stockpiles,” Hassan, the U.N. official, said in an interview. “It’s just nightmarish.”

The prospect of a tidal wave of refugees pouring through Afghanistan’s eastern mountains into Pakistan, joining Afghans already languishing in camps along the frontier, is highly unsettling to local authorities here.

“They will be tired, hungry, angry and armed,” summed up Rifaat Hussain, chairman of the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. “A situation like that would be seriously destabilizing.’

The agony and isolation that mark today’s Afghanistan are far removed from the nation that seemed such a promising target for international aid in the early 1970s.

“A model for development,” recalled Amir Usman, a retired Pakistani diplomat who served in Kabul at the time and returned as ambassador a decade later. “The Americans built the Kabul-Torkham road [leading east to Pakistan] and the Russians built the road to the Amu Darya [leading north to the then-Soviet Union]. It was a happy coexistence.”

Although historically a land riven by ethnic and tribal divisions and foreign interference--the British and Russian empires jostled for control in a series of intrigues that became known as the Great Game, only to be defeated by both stubborn resistance and the country’s rugged terrain--Afghanistan had achieved a certain stability under King Mohammed Zahir Shah, who ruled from 1933 to 1973.

But when a series of coups brought a Marxist leadership to power in 1978, it sparked armed resistance from within the staunchly conservative Muslim society. The Soviet Union invaded the country at Christmastime the following year to prop up its client regime, and Afghanistan descended into a decade-long war of national resistance.

Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, leaving most of the country’s institutions in shambles and heavily armed factions of the victorious resistance fighting each other for power.

“I’m a political scientist and I read about anarchy, but in 1992 I saw it in reality,” said Usman of the civil war that preceded the emergence of the Taliban. “The destruction these groups brought to Kabul was far greater than what the Russians did.”

By early 1994, tens of thousands had died and Kabul had been reduced to rubble. Much of the firepower used in the fighting had been provided by the United States, which spent more than $2 billion during the 1980s to keep Moscow’s forces bogged down.

Although the American-supplied weapons remained, the Soviet departure and the end of the Cold War led the U.S. to lose interest in Afghanistan--only adding to the sense of despair that gripped the country.

For a group of devout young Afghans studying at fundamentalist schools in neighboring Pakistan, the final straw came in November 1994 when warlords hijacked a large convoy of Pakistani trucks as it passed through Kandahar on its way across Central Asia.

Enraged at the seemingly endless anarchy, a few hundred students--or taliban, in Arabic--left their schools and began marching west to the scene. Accounts of their success evoked the campaigns of Joan of Arc.

“Word went before them that they were soldiers of God and people either ran or joined them,” recalled Usman. “From a few hundred, they became thousands. Within six months the anarchy was finished.”

Although the Taliban movement took power in Kabul, it failed to subdue armed resistance groups in the north and its inexperience in the affairs of state made it inept at running a government.

Its strict fundamentalist Islamic beliefs also alienated rich Western nations that could have provided greater aid.

The Clinton administration, which initially backed the Taliban because of the stability it seemed to promise, reversed course, in part under pressure from feminist groups upset at the regime’s restrictive policies toward women.

Bin Laden’s arrival in the country from Sudan in 1996 increased U.S. resolve to isolate the regime.

Today, the Taliban maintains formal diplomatic ties with only three countries--Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. On Saturday, it threatened Pakistan with a de facto declaration of war.

The movement’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, 43, told his people last week that he is not afraid to die.

With existing political forces in the country discredited, some Afghans dream of restoring Zahir Shah, the 84-year-old former king, to power.

He resides in Rome and is still widely respected in his homeland, reportedly has consulted with Western governments about the idea and has met with some Afghan tribal leaders. But the idea is widely seen at best as a longshot.

At the Jalozai camp, refugees focused on the more immediate future and repeated the Taliban’s assertion that Bin Laden was incapable of such a complex terrorist attack as occurred last week in the U.S.

But when asked what the Taliban should do with Bin Laden, they talked among themselves for a couple of minutes and then asked Gul Mohammed to speak for the group.

“Osama bin Laden is just a refugee with no relation to Afghanistan,” he said, squatting in the dust, with a piece of plaid cloth draped over his head against the sun.

“He is Arab. And he is a guest, but if due to Osama the Americans attack, then they should expel Osama.”

*

Marshall reported from Islamabad and Watson from the Jalozai refugee camp.