2008 Woodie Awards
Learning lessons from Afghanistan
Walid Zafar
Issue date: 3/9/07 Section: Opinion
- Page 1 of 3 next >
As we made our escape through a cloak of darkness, relaying from one currier to the next before securing safe passage to Pakistan, we abandoned our homes and our lives in Afghanistan - a nation then torn by civil war and strife. Frankly I remember very little of it, but that which I do recall is as vivid as yesterday. When I was about three or four my grandmother took me to a market in the De Afghanan district of Kabul.
Either not realizing my youthful sensibilities or unable to think of anything else to tell me, she took me to a then crowded section of the city to show me where a rocket had fallen the day before. Along the sidewalk stood a square makeshift shrine which contained the unidentifiable body parts of the victims. I did not understand death then, but I understood what a rocket was, I understood what pain was, and my adolecescence did little to assuage my understanding of war. At that point, the "international community" did not feel much for a people who were mired in a myriad of wars and a prolonged drought that left millions homeless and starving (and all this, mind you, before the Taliban even existed).
From Pakistan we eventually immigrated to the United States. Here we settled, assimilated and attempted to forget all we had seen - especially my uncle, who at 17 had been forceably conscripted into taking up arms. The mine fragments that riddled his legs and lodged near his heart serve as permenant testamonies to what war is. Yet no one cared about my uncle back then, nor my grandmother, nor - for that matter - Afghanistan.
Then 9/11 hit and all of a sudden the entire world cared about the Afghan child and the Afghan woman. Within months, President George W. Bush proclaimed that the ousting of the Taliban had saved the Afghans from "starvation and freed a country from brutal oppression."
The truth, of course, is a lot murkier. In order to get rid of the brutal Taliban regime, the U.S cooperated with a bunch of thugs, akin to rape, murder, drug smuggling and the like. One of the most notorious of these mass murderers was a warlord named Dostum, who during the War orchestrated the notorious "Convoy of Death" in which thousands of Taliban prisoners were executed. He later became Afgahnistan's defense minister. Another brutal warlord and drug trafficker, Muhammad Daoud, assumed the position of deputy interior minister.
Either not realizing my youthful sensibilities or unable to think of anything else to tell me, she took me to a then crowded section of the city to show me where a rocket had fallen the day before. Along the sidewalk stood a square makeshift shrine which contained the unidentifiable body parts of the victims. I did not understand death then, but I understood what a rocket was, I understood what pain was, and my adolecescence did little to assuage my understanding of war. At that point, the "international community" did not feel much for a people who were mired in a myriad of wars and a prolonged drought that left millions homeless and starving (and all this, mind you, before the Taliban even existed).
From Pakistan we eventually immigrated to the United States. Here we settled, assimilated and attempted to forget all we had seen - especially my uncle, who at 17 had been forceably conscripted into taking up arms. The mine fragments that riddled his legs and lodged near his heart serve as permenant testamonies to what war is. Yet no one cared about my uncle back then, nor my grandmother, nor - for that matter - Afghanistan.
Then 9/11 hit and all of a sudden the entire world cared about the Afghan child and the Afghan woman. Within months, President George W. Bush proclaimed that the ousting of the Taliban had saved the Afghans from "starvation and freed a country from brutal oppression."
The truth, of course, is a lot murkier. In order to get rid of the brutal Taliban regime, the U.S cooperated with a bunch of thugs, akin to rape, murder, drug smuggling and the like. One of the most notorious of these mass murderers was a warlord named Dostum, who during the War orchestrated the notorious "Convoy of Death" in which thousands of Taliban prisoners were executed. He later became Afgahnistan's defense minister. Another brutal warlord and drug trafficker, Muhammad Daoud, assumed the position of deputy interior minister.
Be the first to comment on this story