A land devastated

By B. Muralidhar Reddy

AFGHANISTAN TODAY is a nation on the move. While the country's religious leadership has asked the ``prime suspect'' in the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, to move out voluntarily and its ruling Taliban militia is shifting capital from Kabul to safer places, its 25 million commoners are the world's single largest refugee community for the 22nd year running. And, they have no place to go.

As if two decades of invasion and civil war were not enough, they have now invited the wrath of the world's only superpower and neighbours who had traditionally supported and hosted them are closing their borders while famine and fear of war offer them little solace at home.

Their rugged homeland can hide America's most wanted man, but holds little for them. The richer Afghans crowd the border points, hoping to escape the hopelessness of being a refugee in their own country. Others trudge to camps such as the one near Herat where hundreds died of the cold last winter or to the relative safety of rural areas where the worst drought in living memory awaits them. The economy is in tatters; they expect little protection from the ruling Taliban which continues to espouse jehad and is ready to take on the might of America. The only protection the Taliban has so far ``forced'' on the people has turned half the population, the women, into a faceless entity.

The country, once the crossroads of culture, is adrift today. The Afghans, once hailed as valiant warriors, are today reviled as refugees. It cannot get more ironical. This very United States had put the people of Afghanistan on a pedestal in the 1980s and given them money and material support to fight the Soviet Union. Thousands of Afghans perished and millions were rendered homeless at the end of the decade-long proxy war between the U.S. and the erstwhile USSR.

The Soviet Union is gone. The U.S. is the sole superpower. But the Afghans' lot has only gone from bad to worse. As per U.N. estimates, over four million Afghans, nearly one-sixth of the population, are currently living as refugees - 2.5 million in Pakistan and another 1.5 million in Iran. And millions of others are lining up at the borders. About 800,000 Afghans have had to leave their homeland between September 2000 and August this year. And that was much before September 11.

Their two neighbours, Pakistan, to the east, which nursed the Taliban milita to its present stature, and Iran, on the west, have closed their borders. The Central Asian republics to the north too have shut their doors and Russia has deployed troops on the border.

Coming in the wake of a three-year drought that rendered most of western Afghanistan a virtual wasteland, an unending civil war, economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation besides a non- existent economy, the latest threat of war by the U.S. has further rattled a nation that has been on the brink of disaster for a while now.

The refugees who have been able to cross over are blessed compared to the others. Over one million people do not have the resources to see them through to the next harvest, which depends on the rain gods, of course. World Food Programme (WFP) officials say there are food stocks for just three weeks in Afghanistan today. And since they and the NGOs have been forced to evacuate, there is no way to disburse these or replenish them.

This year Afghanistan appealed for $229 millions as aid from the world community but not even one-tenth came. Add to this the branding of international aid workers as zealots spreading Christianity in the Islamic Republic, with death as the penalty, and you have a recipe for disaster for the common Afghan. He has no source of income and has been deprived of dole.

Years of war have left the land once known for its orchards scorched. The irrigation systems have been blasted. Besides, vast tracts have landmines, even a dozen years after the Soviets left.

The trucking business, that supported trade via the land routes across Iran, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, which once generated Rs. 3 million a day and initially filled the Taliban coffers, has now dried up following increased border vigilance. Last year's decree by Mullah Omar banning poppy cultivation deprived his regime of around Rs. 300 million in annual collections. The depleting resources that coincided with the drying up of western aid led to an increase in import tariffs and other taxes. This was the last straw. The other fallout, of course, was the increase in the clout of the cash-rich Arabs, mainly the group led by Osama bin Laden.

An indicator is the state of the Afghani, the currency. In 1979- 80 when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Afghani was four to one Pakistani Rupee. In 1992, it was 16 Afghani to a Pakistani Rupee. In 1993, when Afghanistan was in the first throes of a civil war, it went down to 380 Afghani to a Pakistani rupee. In 1996, it was 600:1 and this year it stands at around 1,300 Afghani to one Pakistani Rupee.

A doctor earns about $10 a month. The salaries increase ten-fold if you find employment with an international aid agency but even that opening is now closed.

During this time of economic adversity, the chief export of the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was jehad. Over the past week, the Taliban has called on Afghans and the Islamic Ummah (brotherhood) to get ready for another long war against the Americans, and, as a result they have started closing ranks. A visible fallout could be reduction in the militancy in Kashmir.

Ever since its emergence in September 1994, the Taliban has tied its Islamic credentials to the rigorous interpretation of the Shariat so that breaking a centuries-old statute becomes a internal, religious matter; supporting Osama bin Laden becomes part of Pashtun honour and a renewed call for a fresh jehad, an answer to `Operation Infinite Justice'.

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