Crossing to Safety, or Conflict

Seen from atop the 7,400-foot-high Khojak Pass, Afghanistan stretches out in splendid serenity--flat desert, broken mountains and the dun-colored adobe walls of scattered settlements and villages in the distance.

But descend just a few miles to Chaman, the gateway from southwestern Pakistan into the land of the Taliban, and all is dust, tumult and excitement as Afghanistan braces for an expected attack from the United States, a superpower thousands of miles away but coming closer.

Afghans and their Pakistani sympathizers are on the move--on foot, in donkey carts, on Chinese-built motorcycles and bicycles, in rented cars and pickup trucks. Some are rushing to Pakistan to get away from the conflict, others merely to place wives and children in relative safety before going back to fight. Still others are religious Pakistanis leaving behind their homes and Koran schools to answer their mullahs’ calls for jihad--holy war--against the Americans.

At the border Saturday, Afghans described a country that is not panicking but getting ready--mainly by moving families to safe locations away from cities like Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital. The witnesses bore out statements by the United Nations that hundreds of thousands of people have already left their homes in cities to go to more remote locations.

Syed Abdul Habib, a bearded man in a black turban leading his wife and 2-year-old son through the crowd at the border post, said he had traveled from the capital, Kabul, to Kandahar and then on to the Pakistani border and had seen many people on the road. But he denied that they or he were seeking to avoid a U.S. attack.

“People are still doing their jobs,” he said. “Maybe they are going here and there for work.”

As for him, he said, he had come to Pakistan simply to bring his wife to see a doctor. “Taliban are never afraid. We trust and depend on God.”

But another Taliban supporter disputed that account.

“In Afghanistan, every person is worried about the attack of Americans,” said Ahata Noorai, 25.

Noorai, who had just deposited his family in Pakistan, was returning with what appeared to be about 20 friends in order to “do jihad for Mullah Omar and for Osama”--that is, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden, suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

While it is important to fight America, Noorai said, “family safety comes first.”

Some refugees said anxieties inside Afghanistan had risen because of America’s demand that Bin Laden be turned over unconditionally, and because in recent days the Taliban has been blocking young men of military age from leaving their country.

Taliban army patrols are active in Kandahar, just 60 miles from Chaman, and troops can be seen setting up antiaircraft guns there, said one man.

But in general, the fighting spirits of the young men appeared high.

“The people of Afghanistan have said we will fight against America--we don’t want any Americans in our land,” said a 20-year-old from Pakistan who asked to be identified only as Talib Sepala. He said America would be defeated in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets were after a decade of occupation in the 1980s.

Officially, the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan has been sealed since Sept. 17. But there is no such thing as a completely closed border here in the Baluchistan region, which accounts for a significant share of the world’s opium and heroin smuggling. A better description might be “somewhat sealed.”

Saturday in Chaman, for instance, about 1,000 Afghan women, children and older men had been sitting on blankets or milling about in the sun for up to five days, hoping for the Pakistani government to relent.

In no man’s land, they lack clean water, food or even a tree for shelter, although the women receive shade from their loose burkas, which make them resemble giant shuttlecocks. At night, the would-be refugees endure the desert chill.

Answering questions from a Pakistani journalist, they complained that the police had been too free in using their batons on them and that the children were starting to suffer from diarrhea.

Yet getting into Pakistan does not seem that difficult for those who have the money for bribes, the connections to obtain Pakistani documents or the legs for a rugged overland walk. There are many footpaths or dirt roads out of sight of border guards where the barbed-wire barrier--if it exists--has been cut.

No one knows exactly how many Afghans have fled to Pakistan since the attacks in America, because most are lying low--afraid of being rounded up and sent back to their country. The figure is presumed to be in the tens of thousands, U.N. officials in the region say.

In a clue to the scale of the flight, the spokesman for the Pakistani border post here, Mohammed Shafi Kakar, said 6,000 to 7,000 Afghans were caught and pushed back across the border in one three-day period last week. He did not know how many got away.

The reason for the exodus is plain, according to William Sakataka, a Kenyan national who heads the headquarters of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Baluchistan’s provincial capital, Quetta. “Everyone thinks that the hour of reckoning is nigh.”

Andrew Wilder, Pakistan field office director of the charity Save the Children, said many of the refugees from Kandahar are urbanites with extended families in Quetta, so they avoid refugee camps. He said other Afghans are fleeing Kabul, fearful of the possibility of anarchy and an offensive on the capital by the opposition Northern Alliance.

Police in Quetta, the large city nearest the Chaman crossing, netted about 500 newly arrived Afghan refugees last week in a sweep of bazaars and cheap hotels. The migrants were collected in the city’s soccer stadium before being trucked to Chaman, from where international officials presume they were forcibly repatriated.

That was the fate awaiting 23-year-old Omar Gul Ahmed, his 20-year-old wife, Farzana, and their 1-year-old son, Raza. Although Pakistani police barked at him repeatedly not to say so, he admitted to Western journalists that he was being sent back to Afghanistan against his will.

“I am aware that the Americans are going to attack Afghanistan, but what can I do?” he said. “The government of Pakistan will not allow me to stay.”

At this point, an officer said to him, “You are going on your own, and there is no pressure.” Gul Ahmed, a carpenter with a wispy beard, said obediently, “There is no pressure on me.”

At his feet, her face covered by her black burka, Farzana crouched with Raza, who whimpered at the flies constantly landing on a sore on his nose. The family had found shade next to a container that functions as a public toilet in the border area. Nearby, a boy squatted over his feces.

Gul Ahmed said he had spent six days in Pakistan before being rounded up. He is a simple man, he explained, and has no desire to fight for the Taliban. He also said he does not know whether most Afghans would.

There has been peace in Afghanistan since the Taliban took over, he said, “but they are always bothering the people about beards and how they have their hair cut.”

In Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, an official with a private aid organization said Saturday that the government had told a meeting of United Nations and private group representatives that it was ready to offer “temporary protection” to Afghan refugees like Gul Ahmed who manage to reach Pakistan, even though the border remains officially closed.

The current plan, this official said, is to brace for a possible influx of 1.5 million additional refugees from Afghanistan in the event of military action there by the United States--1 million in the Northwest Frontier and 500,000 more in Baluchistan.

Aid officials said the government also said it would reopen the frontier if military action generated a wave of civilians fleeing toward Pakistan.

But the Pakistani government would like any new refugees kept separate from the estimated 3 million Afghans already in the country after years of fighting in their homeland.

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Daniszewski reported from the Chaman Border Crossing and Marshall from Islamabad.