Hell Freezes Over

Do we stay or leave? it was a question Hawaneen, a hollow-cheeked Afghan with a wispy beard, had debated with his elders for many weeks, while the famine--the worst in 30 years--tightened its grip on the village. Would they stand a better chance of survival if they remained? Or should they wander elsewhere until they found help? After a three-year drought, every village well had run dry, and the goats and sheep had died. Finally Hawaneen decided it was time to go; he had fed his family the last grains of wheat he had intended to plant this spring if the rains ever came. Besides, word had reached his village in Badgis province that foreign-aid agencies had set up a camp near Herat, an ancient caravansary of broken minarets and sandstorms in western Afghanistan, and were giving out food and medicine there.

Hawaneen arrived at the Herat camp a month ago after selling his plow and even the tin roof off his house to pay for the journey. Now, in the barren, sand-blown camp, Hawaneen crouches against the wind and watches in dumb agony as a Muslim cleric lays the bony, starved corpse of his eight-year-old son on a plastic sheet spread on the ground and washes him for burial.

The hoped-for help never materialized for Hawaneen or for the other 80,000 refugees living in the camp. Says a relief official in neighboring Pakistan: "Afghanistan is going through its worst crisis since the 1979 Soviet invasion, and nobody seems to care." With Afghanistan's current rulers, the strictly Islamist Taliban, imposing their fundamentalist beliefs on women and giving sanctuary to suspected Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, few donors are willing to step forward with emergency aid, even though the U.N. estimates that more than 1 million Afghans may be at immediate risk of starvation.

During a month at Mazlak camp, in the empty desert outside Herat, Hawaneen and his family received 15 lbs. of wheat and a handful of moldy dates. When his son first became ill with pneumonia, Hawaneen waited from dawn to dusk outside the camp clinic, along with hundreds of others stricken with tuberculosis, measles and bronchitis. At last it was Hawaneen's turn. "All they gave me for my son was this," he said helplessly, clutching a plastic strip that once held 12 aspirins.

Among Afghans, readying a corpse for burial is up to the men. But Hawaneen's wife, shrouded in a burqa, is allowed to kneel beside her son's tiny limbs. She weeps quietly as her young daughter lifts a cloth covering the dead boy and kisses his forehead. Then Hawaneen and his clansmen set off at a swift pace to the rocky cemetery. "My two other children are also sick, but what's the point of taking them to the clinic? They can't help," grieves Hawaneen, letting the empty aspirin strip fall from between his fingers into the wind.

Survival is precarious in Afghanistan, even in the best of times. And this has been among the worst of times. Racked by 20 years of war, first between the Afghans and the Soviets and now between the Taliban forces and the rebellious Northern Alliance that includes Tadjik, Uzbek and Hazara tribes, the country was ill prepared for three years during which nothing but dust seemed to fall from the sparse clouds. Says Sigurd Hanson, Afghanistan director for the International Rescue Committee, an aid agency based in New York City: "Afghans are at the end of their resources."

U.N. sanctions against the Taliban--aimed at strong-arming them into giving up bin Laden--have also tightened the squeeze on Afghans. Two rounds of embargoes have reduced the traffic of goods to Afghanistan by air and road, making some essentials, such as gas and kerosene, more expensive. For the Taliban, tariffs were a major source of revenue for the ongoing war. With those gone, the Taliban raised taxes on farmers from 10% to a punishing 60%, helping destroy the livelihood of men like Hawaneen.

For the rural warrior-clerics of the Taliban, Washington's behavior can seem baffling. "We don't understand why the Americans are killing the Afghan people with these sanctions just to get one man--Osama bin Laden," says a Taliban leader in Herat. The Taliban insist that if the U.S. turns over proof of bin Laden's involvement in such terrorist attacks as the August 1998 Kenya and Tanzania bombings, they will gladly hand over bin Laden. The U.S. claims that it provided the evidence, but the Taliban deny this.

The Taliban are also perplexed over the lack of international support for their crackdown on the heroin trade. Last July, Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Mohammed Omar announced a ban on poppy cultivation. At first, antidrug officials were skeptical, since Afghanistan produces 75% of the world's opium. But earlier this month, U.N. drug-control officials surveyed four main opium-growing areas and found the land clean of opium poppies. So far, however, neither the U.S. nor any other country has offered to help the Afghan farmers with crop-substitution programs.