Afghanistan on the other side of death

  RT POLITICS

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Published: 21 January, 2011, 19:46

January 2011

­The moment Afghan President Hamid Karzai chose to come to Moscow was not a good time for his country. In fact, the Afghans have long forgotten what a good time is, since war has been raging across their land for the past thirty years.

This land is like a ringing song about death and about the people unhurriedly and tirelessly singing this formidable, ancient song.

The road from Termez to Mazar-i-Sharif goes through the gray sands of the Karakum Desert that have crossed over the Amu Darya. The highway, built back in the Soviet period, cuts through gray dunes and runs south.

But the sand is moving, borne by the wind and time. Dunes advance. One grain of sand after another gets on the asphalt, and the man-made strip of the road gradually disappears under its serpentine trickles.

There are old men with shovels standing along the road. They stand as symbols of time, as its sentries. The wind ruffles their white beards, and their dim eyes are full of the understanding of how vain and futile life is.

When a car speeds by, the old men wave their shovels, as if scaring the sand away from the road, as if protecting the travelers from the demons of the black desert.

In this way, they hold back the dunes, the desert and time itself, the sand being its most ancient symbol.

A local tradition requires that you throw a few small bills to the old men. The wind scatters those pieces of paper among dusty dunes. The old men follow the car with their eyes and once again stand motionless like the guards of the gray sands. They have no interest in the money. They don’t move, and the wind carries it away into the desert.

What does the money matter here? Afghanistan is a country where time has stopped.

Taliban

The word has become a generic term. Today, people on all the continents know those Afghan students or at least have heard of them.

But who are they? And where did they come from? Why are they waging their ruthless war? What do they want? Let’s face it, the world doesn’t know much about that.

The first time I saw them they were dead. Fifteen-year-old boys were lying like piles of rags on a road south of Salang. They were surrounded and got killed in a suicidal attack against machine guns.

Cars were driving around the dead bodies; sheep and children were wandering between them; women and old men were walking by. “They will take the bodies away in the evening,” a soldier of Massoud’s 1st Brigade told me. “They are like dogs, and they will be buried like dead animals.”

The common appearance of this death, as well as the fear and hatred with which my companion spoke, caused me to take a closer look at the Taliban in order to understand what it was that they wanted – those children of war deprived of everything Europeans include in the notion of “young years.”

The Afghan war has been going on and on for more than thirty years now. Several million Afghan people were killed over this period, and more than ten million fled from the country.

During those thirty years, almost all the great powers of the world have tested their military might in Afghanistan.

Those who were children when the catastrophe began in 1979 have long grown up. Today, they teach their grandchildren and raise them as warriors.

The orphans of the Soviet war in the mid-1990s, brought together by Pakistani secret services, Saudi financial aid and American political techniques, they made themselves a name by going to war with the mujahideen, the veterans of the struggle against the Soviet Union.

Those old dogs of war had grown rich and fat through American and Arab aid; the whole world used to support them. Having come to power, they finished off the country. They turned Kabul into smoking ruins and divided Afghanistan into feudal domains that made a living through robbery and the drug trade.

The Taliban came as angels of vengeance. They took down all the old warriors, one after another: Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, Khalili, Rabbani, Massoud, Dustum, and so on.

Where did they get help from? Why did Afghanistan embrace them?

Almost twenty years have passed since they emerged. Those who were little boys in the early 1990s are battle-hardened warriors today. Their name is the symbol of staunch resistance to invaders. All who want to fight against US and NATO troops call themselves Taliban – even those who have never been students of Islam.

The operations that the Americans and the British plan against them fail again and again. So, now we are on our way to a meeting with Taliban. We would like to understand what motivates them and what they want.

Poppy

If Afghanistan has a symbol (one imposed on it by the world media), it is a poppy head with a Kalashnikov rifle next to it and some mountains in the background. With the Americans in, local heroin production has grown hundreds of times. Why?

Some say it’s the payment for the loyalty of local tribal chiefs.

Huge road tankers carrying thousands of tons of formaldehyde (a chemical needed in drug production) are speeding to secret laboratories.

The Americans are supervising the whole thing with the help of satellites and spy planes, but they look the other way as those horrible caravans are on the move.

It is claimed that Afghanistan will die of hunger, if you remove the poppy from the equation. No one tried to check the veracity of this claim.

It is common knowledge, however, that prior to all wars Afghanistan grew saffron, a spice essential in Oriental cooking. They say that in terms of price, saffron was coming close to heroin.

But it grows and sells the hard way. This is why drugs flow to the Western world and Russia, where they are exchanged for hard cash.

How can Afghanistan and the world be rid of the poppy curse? Who stands to gain from those death fields?

We are heading to the heartland of the poppy-growing Afghanistan in order to know what the growers think about it. Wouldn’t they like to conquer this evil by giving up the poppy?

Americans and NATO

This land saw numerous invaders: the Huns, the Persians, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British, the Soviets…

Currently we have the Americans that look like creatures from another planet in some Hollywood blockbuster. They, too, are after military luck in Afghanistan.

Everyone scampers away seeing them ride their vehicles in city streets. A photographer cannot lift his camera; the omnipresent street urchins that used to rush to meet Soviet APC’s, crying, “Bakhshish! Bakhshish!” would now hide in the backstreets.

They know only too well that the Americans would shoot without warning. Horror and hatred follow in their wake wherever they go in Afghanistan.

All promises of peace and democracy degenerated into more war and devastation, and uncountable fruitless operations resulting in fresh bloodshed, hatred, horror, lies, and a new upward spiral in drug production.

Why are they here? They are not quite sure themselves.

But we will try to grasp what is happening to the world’s mightiest army in these dust-filled, dilapidated cities. We will try to sort out why it is unable to do what seemed so simple and obvious ten years ago, when the US force was just pulling in to give a fight.

When will they grow tired? And what will follow when they do?

­Maksim Shevchenko, specially for RT Politics

­The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.