Opinion

Dangerous Afghanistan

Entry into Afghanistan by American troops will be dangerous, bloody and hard. The Afghanistan I remember, before the Taliban, before the Soviet invasion, was a poor country of harsh, rocky soil and generous people.

In April, 1974, we'd come to Herat on the western edge of the country. It was a city of small baked mud buildings, a grand Mosque, and stood at the crossroads between China and Europe, Persia and India. It had been there for more than a thousand years.

But for the Mosque it felt like a town of the Old West.

We were "drifters," the ebb and flow of young Americans, Canadians and Europeans that moved back and forth between the Atlantic and India. Some were looking for drugs, others for God, most were searching for themselves.

We stayed at the Jami Hotel, a two-story adobe building in a town where most of the structures were small mud cubes with one side open to the single street.

In the stall next to the cobbler, the size of a small bedroom, we could buy lettuce and onions, at the next shoes and shirts. In the next, stacked back from the opening were large baskets half-full of tea, peanuts, raisins, dates.

The floor was four feet off the ground and covered with carpets we'd labeled as Persians, the shop keeper sitting at eye level, cross legged in a narrow passage between his baskets.

We had been warned that the American Embassy sent home the body of one young man or woman per week. A backpack and travelers' checks were a fortune in this land where we could live quite well for $1 per day.

My pack was intentionally small and shabby. I had no camera.

Two-wheeled carriages went up and down the road looking for penny fares, wheels varnished or beautifully painted, the horses sleek and well-fed and adorned with bobbles and bells, past children poor and grimy.

Five years later, the communist government battled its own people in Herat. Thousands died in one day.

The desert from Herat south to Kandahar was barren. Wiry shepherds guided sheep over dusty rock, camels trooped beside the baking pavement.

In beautiful Kandahar, a river flowed near lush green courtyards of gleaming white buildings, fine ancient hotels, Mosques. After the vast plain of scabrous rock and sand at the base of brown, bare, rugged mountains, Kandahar was an oasis.

In Kandahar we shed our sturdy and stolid Westerness, our boots and blue jeans and tee shirts, for sandals and the soft, long and loose cotton clothing of the East.

I've read the city I remember has since been destroyed.

Kabul was concrete, urban, and grimy. The zoo was despair, the grand market a rough bazaar. Our journey was on hold while waiting for visas to India. The Pakistanis and Indians had been fighting, again, and crossing the border had to be arranged before we got to what had been the front lines.

This region has been in a nearly constant state of war for generations.

We rode horses in the barren hills north of the city. Horses have long been an important part of the culture. The national sport of Afghanistan is Buskachi, a game like rugby, but on horseback, with the carcass of a goat for the ball.

A game could last for a week. Death was common.

We came to believe that faith was not that the future would be secure, but the past was forgiven. We tried not to offend the faith of our hosts.

In tiny stalls along the streets, shopkeepers were warm, honest. They hated the Russians but liked Americans, and gave us tea with so much sugar it was nearly undrinkable, a sacrifice they made in an effort to win our friendship.

They needed little to survive: food, sleep, water. The men wore woolen hats and vests with a herringbone weave over baggy cotton trousers, able to ignore searing heat and biting cold.

At night Soviet tanks would clank through the street, propping up the government. There was a curfew. Our hotel had a high, thick wall, the heavy gate locked after dark.

It would be five years or so before those Soviet tanks would try to take over this country. After 10 years of war, 1.5 million Afghani dead and 3 million refugees, they would fail, as did the British before them, as did Alexander the Great and various maharaja of India, even Genghis Khan.

As we headed through the Kyber Pass, into the teeming lushness of Pakistan and India, dry ravines crinkled the impossibly hostile landscape, which felt like wadded up cardboard, our road at the bottom of a crease.

Canyon walls held adobe fortresses where local chieftains could rain rocks or bullets down on those below.

There was a story that one of those chieftains hosted a British emissary. As a parting gift to his guest, customary among the Pathan tribesmen of the area, the chieftain gave the Ambassador a package.

Inside was a working reproduction of an automatic rifle that the British were just then developing in secret back in England to replace the venerable Enfield rifle that the Afghanis could make by hand out of purloined water pipe.

The Russians would later learn Afghanis could build rocket launchers out of old coffee cans.

But twenty years of war destroyed this hard country. The Taliban took control of the rubble. Widows starve in the streets because the Taliban won't let women work. The Taliban claims to voice the Koran, but can't read.

Afghanistan is a rugged land. The Afghanis are a tough, resilient, resourceful people. They were warriors long before the United States funneled weapons to the Muhajadeen, some of whom became the Taliban, in our successful effort to mire the Soviets in their own Viet Nam.

Now we need to rid the world of the terrorist and the Taliban. But remember that the Taliban are not Afghanistan. And don't think it will be easy.