The Hidden Enemies
The New York Times
December 18, 2001
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
LI KHUJA, Afghanistan -- Abdul
Taher is a slight 14-year-old farm boy
facing a choice that would baffle any
grown-up: Should he risk starvation or risk
having his leg blown off by a land mine?
His family lives in this village 30 miles north
of Kabul, in an area that is heavily mined, so
it would be crazy to walk through the family's farmland, even after such
primitive Afghan-style mine-clearing methods as driving a flock of sheep
through first. (This is a tough country for livestock as well as humans.)
Yet the family has to eat, and the only way to get food is to work the land -
even if every step is dangerous. This makes the problem of land mines
central to any discussion of Afghanistan's future, for the mines are a critical
impediment to the country's recovery. Long after Osama bin Laden is buried,
after a new government is presiding over Afghanistan's reconstruction, land
mines will continue to haunt this country.
The Bush administration is now conducting an interagency review to
determine its policy on land mines, and every signal is that it will pull back
from President Bill Clinton's quasi-pledge to join the international ban on
antipersonnel mines by 2006. Instead of belatedly joining the Ottawa
Convention to ban mines, we seem determined to walk away from it.
The outcome of the review on land mines will help determine how many
children lose their legs and lives in the coming decades, how many countries
find their economic recovery blocked by buried mines. This is an area where
we have a strong national interest, as well as a humanitarian interest, in
playing a leadership role to help evict land mines from the arsenal of wars,
and yet Pentagon complacency and President Bush's allergy to treaties
together make it very likely that we will be part of the problem rather than
the solution.
The laying of mines is the 21st- century equivalent of what the Romans did to
Carthage: plow salt into the ground so that it could never again sustain a
population. The number of mines in Afghanistan is usually wildly exaggerated,
because estimates come from nongovernment organizations trying to raise
money to clear them (figures of 10 million are sometimes thrown about, when
a more careful extrapolation from areas that have been cleared suggests
fewer than one million, perhaps only 300,000). But still, whatever the
exaggerations, on average three Afghans a day are maimed or killed by
mines.
To clear a mine, a worker waves a metal detector over the grounduntil it
buzzes, then uses a metal rod to probe - gently - from the side, and then a
trowel to uncover it. If it is a mine, he uses a charge to blow it up.
The job, which pays $105 a month, requires intense concentration. The
Afghan who showed me how to clear mines recalled a colleague who had
had a bitter argument with his wife one night and was still upset as he showed
up for work the next morning. Distracted, he probed too aggressively - and
blew himself up.
Along roads and footpaths of Afghanistan, painted stones mark the safe
zones - white on the inner, cleared side, and red on the outer, dangerous
side. And yet one constantly sees Afghans walking into the minefields to
gather fuel or till their fields. It is not that they are stupid or oblivious; it is that
they feel they have no choice.
New technologies and new kinds of wars have eclipsed the usefulness to us
of land mines. They protect soldiers stationed for long periods in enemy
territory, as Americans were in Vietnam and Korea, or as Russians were in
Afghanistan, but they endanger our troops in modern wars like our
deployments in Afghanistan or Somalia. Eight retired generals have written to
President Bush saying that mines are not critical to our operations in Korea
or elsewhere, and would slow a counter-invasion of North Korea in any
war.
The nub of the problem is that it will be impossible to restrain irresponsible
users of land mines unless the entire international community, including the
United States, is four- square against them. The mines in this village, for
example, were mostly laid by the Northern Alliance, our new ally. If its
leaders feel threatened, their impulse will be to lay new mines - and how
can we tell them not to when we reserve the right to lay mines ourselves?
This is an issue where the United States could and should get out front and
lead the world, thus saving future generations of kids from the excruciating
choices faced by Abdul Taher.
nytimes.com |
