Awaiting The People of Afghanistan
"I want our government to stop the war in our country, I want the Taliban to stop planting roadside bombs. This is what can happen." Norzia, 11 years old, double amputee.
This is the Afghan Taliban the child speaks of. This is also the government of her country whom she makes allusion to. She can hardly be expected, at the age of eleven, to have informed and intimate knowledge of the violent politics that rage within her country. Yet she has had a harsh introduction to the level of violence contained in her country's politics, and has become intimately and irrevocably life-altered, as a result.
The child of a shepherd, she was hit by a Soviet-era landmine while tending to sheep. She knows what explosives can do, the human damage they wreak; her painful experience is being repeated time and again, and as a result of improvised explosive devices, a parochial version of the earlier Russian landmines, that the ultra-religious group calling themselves the Taliban, have become proficient at producing.
Her simple and direct response to a growing problem would, of course, in her childish innocence, overlook the fact that her government seems powerless to stop the activities of their fanatic adversaries. She would have no knowledge that the Government of Afghanistan is endemically corrupt, incapable and disinterested. Nor that her government is engaged in negotiations with the Taliban.
For that matter, the movement of 'religious scholars' which the Taliban claim to represent, seeking to reimpose strict and stricter Sharia law within the country, and in the process dictate every facet of an already tradition-straitened society burdened with its ardent share of Islamist misanthropy and misogyny, itself corrupt with poppy trade, and infused with hatred is also being courted by NATO, anxious to leave Afghanistans to look to their own affairs.
This is a religious-political-ideological movement whose goal is to ensure that their country remains mired in the Stone-Age. Their bombs have changed over time, given encouragement and instruction and ingredients from Pakistan and Iran, to evolve from cheaply-made explosives full of nails and metal bits into more explosive devices using fertilizers from Pakistan.
And to ensure the utter deadliness of the IEDs, requiring amputation due not only to impact but additionally to infection, the Taliban, those purveyors of Islamic values and perfection in human affairs, cover these bombs with urine, feces or blood. The better to destroy limbs, infest them with deadly bacteria and in this manner prey unceasingly on civilians, along with foreign combatants.
The International Red Cross operates its largest orthopedic centre in the country, along with an additional six other such centres, offering hope and rehabilitation to those affected. These are free-of-charge orthopedic centres, seeing about six thousand new patients each year in that embattled country. One sixth of whom are direct victims of war, wounded by the heightened aggravation of more powerful bombs.
Civilian deaths too have been increased for a fifth straight year, with over three thousand civilians killed in 2011 alone, the vast majority by insurgents. The IEDs, helpfully planted on roads along with the increasingly frequent and deadly suicide attacks targeting civilians are responsible for more civilian deaths than any other type of attack.
These details, expressing the deliberate and intended targeting of the Afghan civilian population by an fanatical Islamist movement that is determined to resurrect itself as the ruling administration with the certain and scheduled departure of NATO and UN-allied troops speak to the horrors that once again await the people of Afghanistan.
Labels: Afghanistan, Conflict, Corruption, Crime, Islamism, NATO
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, April 14, 2012
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