| Afghanistan Chronicles, Part 3: Children of Terror |
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| Source: |
Truthout |
By: |
Jim Burroughs and Mary Ann Skweres |
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Afghanistan has been at war, with little respite, since the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979. Only the enemies and uniforms have changed. The physical devastation of the conflict is evident in the destroyed buildings and maimed populace. Not as readily discernible are the mental effects on the people, and, in particular, the children - a generation raised with war as their only frame of reference. The children of terror.
Thirty years ago, the Soviets supported the violence of direct attacks against the civilian population in retaliation for harboring the mujahedin warriors. This policy was coupled with the indiscriminate violence perpetrated by the massive amount of land mines sown or dropped throughout the countryside. As many as 10 million mines - the most of any country on earth - not only targeted combatants, but also killed and maimed thousands of villagers, including children. This combined carnage set in motion a massive flight of refugees into neighboring countries. From a prewar population of around 15 million, 2.5 million - mostly women and children - fled to the relative safety of the camps amassed along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Life in Afghanistan had not always been this way. Wakil Akbarzai, a former mujahedin commander with the moderate National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (NIFA) organization, remembers growing up in Afghanistan before the wars, and how being a child in Jalalabad during that time was much like being a child in other rural areas of the world. Young boys worked the fields with their fathers; young girls learned to sew or tended to infant siblings. And there was fun - reaching for the sky on swings hung from trees, floating along with the current of a local river, running around, playing tag. Their lives were filled with joy and laughter.
With the advent of war, however, Afghan children took on the stoicism normally attributed to their elders. A different way of dealing with pain and grief, this patient endurance was apparent in the faces of gravely injured youths as they lay quietly, without moans or cries, in camp field hospitals. The sight of these maimed children, many missing limbs or eyes, shocked the "Shadow of Afghanistan" crew when they first filmed in the country.
Still, during war, children are children. Despite horrific situations, they find a way to play, even when that play mirrors the life they now live. The roof and sides of a refugee tent in Pakistan that is now home becomes a canvas to draw art on - art that depicts the familiar images of war: tanks and gunships and butchered stick figures. A bombed-out building becomes a playground where young boys play war games with primitive toy guns crafted from bits of wood, falling into the mud to "die" with their eyes wide open - an all too common sight. An open space becomes a sports field where groups of boys struggle to knock each other down, all the while hopping on one leg as they hold their other leg behind them with one hand - a one-legged game delivering a simple message that even a maimed Afghan can resist the invaders.
Notwithstanding the resilience of young minds and hearts, children are impressionable. Orphans without the guidance and nurturing of family can be taught beliefs otherwise foreign to their nature. Beginning in the mid 1980s, over 2,000 fundamentalist madrassas were erected, using Saudi and US money, in Pakistan near refugee camps. It was in these religious schools that boys learned the Wahabbi version of Islam, Saudi Arabia's dominant faith, an austere form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran that is alien to Afghan tradition. The militant clerics, who taught the young refugees, became the only family these lost boys knew.
Eventually these displaced children grow up. In war-torn places like Afghanistan, they grow up to fight for what they have been taught. For the length of the border, alongside the refugee camps, tough Pashtun warlords with their own Deobandi sect of Islam similar to the extreme beliefs of the Wahabs oversaw the operation of training camps set up by the mujahedin. With Saudi funding, US and Chinese weapons, and Pakistani military trainers assisted by the Interservices Intelligence Agency (ISI), Pakistan's secret police, and Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, Afghan boys were taught the arts of war. Young novices learned to launch RPGs, shoot assault rifles and rig booby-traps, believing sincerely in their jihad.
The long-term effect on Afghanistan was that, by the time the Soviets finally left the country in 1989, these children had grown up into young adults whose only knowledge of the world was of war, and whose mandate was to set up an extremist Islamic state friendly to Pakistan. They returned to a country still strewn with land mines, where the rural infrastructure had been destroyed and the only jobs to be had were fighting a civil war for one power-hungry commander or another. These motherless boys, taught fundamentalist Islam and trained in the art of war, became the Taliban - warriors with extreme religious convictions, lead by the young, uneducated, but charismatic Mullah Omar, who had earned a reputation for bringing raping and murdering commanders to harsh justice. They came to power by promising the Afghan people peace based on Islamic principles. Once the country was secure, they vowed to step down from power. This is not what happened.
Fatima Gailani, the director of the Red Crescent (the Red Cross in Muslim countries) and daughter of NIFA leader Pir Gailani, commented that, with proper guidance, these young boys would have risked their lives to do anything for their country. Instead, they became the new oppressors of their own people and the supporters of terror.
| Afghanistan Chronicles, Part 2: A Search for Bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains |
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| Source: |
Truthout |
By: |
Jim Burroughs |
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A Taliban soldier talks of disturbing events and still unanswered questions; a discussion of an unreported escape of a Taliban and/or al-Qaeda SUV caravan across the border into Pakistan on the night of November 28, 2001.
Outside Jalalabad, on the way to a mountain range called Tora Bora ("Black Mountain"), there are a number of small villages that have changed little since Biblical times. Leaving from the Spinghar Hotel, in November 2001, I led the first film crew to investigate rumors that al-Qaeda Arabs were hiding in Tora Bora until the coast was clear to make an escape. Tora Bora is a region that nearly skirts the Pakistani border near Pakistan's Kurram Agency. Rumor also had it that al-Qaeda had upped the price for the head of any foreign journalist, but it also seemed likely the Arabs would not want to draw attention and reveal their presence by taking out one intrepid crew. At least, that's what we assumed, and we decided to take the chance.
The local people claimed there were hundreds of Arabs in Tora Bora, a vast, rugged range of hills and mountains dotted with caves which were dug by the American CIA and the Saudis to provide refuge for anti-Soviet mujahidin during the Soviet war in the 1980s. There had been a US air strike in the area with cluster bombs a week before, but no ground forces had been deployed.
Our first contact on Tora Bora, a local man who had tagged along with us who claimed to know everything about the area, seemed to be covering up the facts. Our translator, Lal Aga, noticed tent poles still standing where the canvas had been removed. The tents were Arab, he insisted, not Afghan. A dog appeared who was caring for her newborn pups. There were a series of small caves filled with pots, pans, food and ammunition. Time to leave.
Before leaving the region, we interviewed a Taliban soldier who had just cut his beard and thrown away his turban. He refused to give his name, he said, to protect his family. He was terrified to talk about the Arabs, but the $100 he was offered would help him escape to Pakistan. He had been living with his mother in Jalalabad when the Taliban arrived a year before to conscript him. He had no choice, he said, but to join the Taliban to protect her.
He said he had seen Osama bin Laden many times in Jalalabad, nearby Duranta and other places. He confirmed bin Laden had a satellite phone with him 24 hours a day, and that no one else was allowed to touch it - ever. Did he ever see bin Laden talking with foreigners, we asked? Yes, frequently, he said, bin Laden would walk in his garden with foreigners who spoke other languages - and he would often spend time talking with many Americans. And how did he know they were speaking English? Because the al-Qaeda translators told him they were Americans. There had been many of them several weeks before the American planes had begun bombing.
One must wonder who these Americans were? Could they simply be nongovernmental organizations trying to work out an arrangement with bin Laden on some logistical issue? Or were they other Americans, discussing other things? No one has ever come forward - but then, no network aired this interview, even though it was offered in December 2001 when the independent team returned to the United States.
Discussing the interview back at the hotel that night, our colleagues from the ABC crew had little to say. They insisted the real news was in Kabul, and, because of a shocking murder of four journalists on the road to Kabul, they had been ordered back to Peshawar.
Meanwhile, Afghan facilitator Wakil Akbarzai, who had worked with the United Nations and the Afghan Rescue Organization under the auspices of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan (NIFA) (and who now heads up the Afghan American Trading Company in New York), remained in Peshawar buying food and renting housing for the ABC crew, although he claimed that they never paid or reimbursed him. It was Ramadan, a 30-day period during which no food or drink is taken from sunrise to sunset. Breakfast was always at 4 AM. On the morning of November 28, Akbarzai's table included two other NIFA commanders who had spent the night in Torkham (the small town at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border) keeping an eye on the border crossing. At around 2 AM, they said, bright lights from the Pakistani military post that illuminate the area were suddenly turned off. In the darkness, six new SUVs approached the gate with their lights off. The gate opened and the vehicles crossed into Pakistan to disappear somewhere in the Khyber Pass.
Nothing of this was ever mentioned in the American press, although subsequent articles have hinted at the event. Other American journalists were told about it, but they reported nothing. What could this have meant? Many things, of course, some of which are suggested in our film, "Shadow of Afghanistan," and my memoir, "Blood on the Lens," but one thing is certain - orders had been sent from someone in power in Pakistan to let the caravan pass. A deal of some kind had been struck, at least by some of the players.
| Afghanistan Chronicles, Part 1: The United States Bombs Afghanistan |
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| Source: |
Truthout |
By: |
Jim Burroughs and Mary Ann Skweres |
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On October 6, 2001, US aircraft carriers were in position in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Pakistan, preparing to avenge the deaths of 9/11. On October 7, the bombing of Afghanistan began, a combination of missiles and aircraft with smart bombs. An estimated 50,000 Taliban soldiers were stationed throughout Afghanistan at key locations in their ongoing war with Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud's small Northern Alliance army,which still held the Panjshir Valley in the north of the country. (Panjshir Province in the northwest region of Afghanistan, with its mostly Tajik population of 139,000, is one of 334 provinces in the country.)
There were large Taliban forces in the capital of Kabul as well as Jalalabad (the largest city in Eastern Afghanistan and the capital of Nangarhar Province, situated between the Pakistan border and Kabul approximately 95 miles away), said to be the center of the al- Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was rumored to have favored Jalalabad for his living quarters. The estimated number of Afghan Arabs, the name for Arab fighters from other nations that made up al-Qaeda, was thought by general consensus to be around 5,000. Supposedly, the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar were not known. The US air strikes were effective and provided the cover by which the Northern Alliance made their move on Kabul. The fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance was fierce.
Al-Qaeda's perfectly planned assassination of Massoud on Sept 9, 2001, two days before the twin towers were taken out half a world away, evidenced a military plan that was flawless. Few Americans were aware of the significance of the double strike - against both the United States and the Taliban's most formidable enemy within Afghanistan itself. But the Afghan people knew, and it incensed them, especially the fighters of the Tajik north. Fearful that Massoud's men might attempt to take Kabul themselves, word was sent out by the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Pashtun peoples of the south that the Northern Alliance should wait until all the organizations and ethnic groups were present. Massoud's enraged army ignored them and moved towards Kabul with a vengeance. US bombing cut a path for them. Most Americans to this day have no idea of al-Qaeda's clockwork capability. Ten years later, on September 20, 2011, the similar, shocking assassination by two suicide bombers of three-time former president Burhanuddin Rabbani, whose defense minister and military arm was Massoud, proves that their deadly capability is still in place. Massoud was also assassinated by two al- Qaeda suicide bombers from North Africa posing as reporters, one with a camera containing a bomb.
Waiting for the US bombing to cease, reporters began amassing in Peshawar, Pakistan - a key base for the mujahidin and all anti-Taliban activity - located near the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. By mid-November, news crews began filtering through the Khyber Pass, entering under the armed protection of anti-Taliban mujahidin. The bomb-ridden road to Kabul passes through Jalalabad, about 90 miles north of the border. The Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad became the refuge of choice for the arriving news crews who gathered and waited for news of the fall of Kabul. The importance of Jalalabad itself was overlooked by the reporters focused on events in Kabul. Few ventured beyond the hotel perimeter. Those who did stumbled into critical information.
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The US bombing of the Taliban's military base in Jalalabad was a testimony to advances in military technology. One could observe hundreds of cannons, tanks and other traditional ordnances converted to melted metal, while nonmilitary houses and buildings on the periphery were mostly left unscathed. The officer's quarters were blown to splinters and only the headquarters flag appeared in one piece.
Those who were bold enough - or, some said, foolish enough - to venture still further would discover other important data. Driving and then trekking with a small armed escort about 25 miles from Jalalabad, filmmaker Jim Burroughs came upon a village that had suffered damage from US bombs targeting caves high up on the hills behind the village. Seven villagers had died when the bombings loosened a landslide that fell upon their homes. One might have expected rage from these people who had lost loved ones and neighbors, but the response of the residents was completely the opposite. They smiled broadly and shook hands with the first American they had seen and thanked him for fighting the Taliban, even though the bombing was an unfortunate US mistake. These were ancient caves from the time of the Buddhists, the village chief said, and there were no Taliban or al-Qaeda in their area.
The response of the Afghan people in 2001 was almost universal. They despised the Taliban, their Arab cohorts and the vice-and-virtue police who demanded that all women wear the burqa, measured if men had long enough beards, and even checked that their pubic hair had been shaved. The Afghan people love music, dancing, pets, books and movies. They hated the Taliban then, and they hate them now - but ten dollars a day for wearing a turban and shooting at NATO soldiers is better than watching their families starve to death.
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