Afghanistan 2001: Hands and Feet

The effects of war in Kabul

Note: This dispatch was originally published in the New Times in 2001 when Kevin was covering the war in

KABUL, Afghanistan -- This is how it works. There are two wires. They are insulated wires. But still, they are jammed into the socket openings in the wall.

Follow the wires. They wrap a couple of times around a steel bed frame, across the floor and finally, thread the grooves carved into a brick, sitting on other bricks in the middle of the room. The wired brick is glowing.

Keeping warm in Afghanistan

On this chill night in December, this is where the orphans warm their hands — huddled around this glowing brick.

They are not sad or whining or feeling sorry for themselves. They are laughing, campfire faces, flushed in red — happy for this one thing, this small warm thing.

* * *

At the once grand, but now crumbling Kabul Intercontinental Hotel, colleagues talk of exit strategies and make flight plans to Islamabad aboard

The story here is not over yet; it's beginning to be. The rooftop, once packed shoulder to shoulder with TV network satellite dishes and live spot positions, is now thinning. Crews heading to other locations or rotating out. Those of us left here are like children at summer camp, watching others kids' parents pick them up and take them home, wondering when our own will arrive.

Instead, our work continues with the new people they send us. Another NBC correspondent has arrived via relief chopper from Dushanbe. Nightly News's pivot man, Jim Avila. He is fresh and ready to go. Impatient to cover the war, or what's left it.

Today with Avila and a crew just in from Miami, we head to a place called Reshkhor, said to have been one of the largest al-Qaida terrorist training bases in the country. American B-52s bombed it for a week straight.

It is a field of rubble and twisted rebar. Building facades turned to Swiss cheese, making holy shadows on the ground, Russian T-55 tanks flashed-cooked in their tracks. Avila does an on-camera standup in the 15-foot crater left by a 500-pound American bomb.  Later, colleagues who see the video all say almost exactly the same thing, but at separate times: "Good to see U.S. tax dollars at work."

Mohammed Yahia, the Northern Alliance soldier who serves as both guard and tour guide at Reshkhor, takes us to what's left of a thatch of connected buildings about mile from the base's entrance. He tells us to watch our step, and then points out exposed land mines amidst the chunks of wood and concrete.

He takes us to a room, he says, was the al-Qaeda library. There are papers and books scattered everywhere.

Terror treasure trove?

I pick up a cover with the title "Special Forces Operations." It has a photograph of a British commando on the front, but the face is scribbled out with pen. Avila picks up a chemistry manual. There is also a pair of black rubber gloves under the debris.

These are clues for the investigatively challenged. Inspector Clouseau could crack this case. It is all so obvious that we wonder if the evidence has been planted. A U.S. black bag op, scattering terrorism's accoutrements after the air raids, knowing we would find them and make the Taliban-al-Qaeda terrorism link undisputable. Journalistic skepticism kicking in.

But in a country of perpetual chaos, conspiracies are tough to hatch, and there's no word from local villagers that any other Americans, besides journalists, have actually been on the ground here. Mohammed tells us there is one other place that we should see. We follow him up a dirt road that leads to a bunker in the hillside.

From sophomore science I remember this: potential energy is stored energy, the energy equivalent of basketball's sixth man: on the bench when the game starts but the first one buzzed in to play. Kinetic energy is the energy of something in motion.

As we walk past the door of the bunker, what we see is a bit hard to comprehend. Piles and piles of potential energy. Pandora's Box, filled with ammunition. An island of misfit ordinance. If we slip, trip or drop say, the camera, all of it could be quickly converted to the kinetic kind.

At this moment, I am walking on a carpet of copper, my boots chinkling through thousands of live Kalashnikov rounds.

To the left, an open wooden crate filled with TS-50's. In military circles, they call them Chinese toe poppers — landmines with just enough explosives to take off your foot. Engineered, diabolically, not to kill, but to maim so your comrades must shoulder their weapons while they try to carry you to safety. They are plastic and paperweight-small with little pressure triggers on the top. They are benign looking, almost cute. If you were a child you would want to stack them up like blocks. Adults here plant them. Like seeds.

But this is just the beginning. In another corner, stacks of discus-shaped anti-tank mines. A colleague of mine, a reporter from the Voice of America, saw a man and his donkey step on one of these on the road outside Khodja Bahaudin. She told me when the parts finally landed she couldn't tell man from beast.

In the back of the room are hundreds of cylinders stacked from floor to ceiling. They are loaded with rocket-propelled grenades, as ubiquitous as dust here. To the right, sinister-looking rockets with fins, and against the east wall, a stack of claymore anti-personnel mines. They are printed with these words in English: "Front towards enemy." I think that anyone truly needing instructions like these will eventually blow himself or herself up anyway.

The room is frightening, but at the same time, deadly fascinating. I know the destructive power that surrounds me. Have seen it firsthand, the history and potential of these weapons to wreak havoc and heartache, to permanently make people and families and villages less than whole forever.

Despite this, I am intrigued by it all. It is perhaps, that hard-wired male desire to see things explode. I don't want anyone hurt, but help me; I do want to reach down into the pile of hand grenades, pull the pin and toss it into an open field. Just to see what happens. I am able to control the impulse.

On my way out of the room, in a corner behind the door, I see something else less lethal: stacks of old Russian helmets. A few of them have messages scribbled across them with a black marker. They are written in Dari.

I pick one up and show my translator, Ahmed. His eyes widen as he reads, "It says, this is the Jihad of the Taliban." I nod with approval, and then tuck it under the backseat of the van. I will take it to America to remind me of the deadly potential energy here.

In the nearby villages, I see a man with crutches moving around on one leg. I ask him what happened. He points to a field and pantomimes an erupting explosion. When we are finally finished, ready to leave, Mohammed, the soldier guard/guide, asks us to contact the demining unit of the United Nations.

"They should know about this," he says. "Villagers are coming in and taking things from here."

* * *

Countless tragic tales in Afghanistan

"Fazle, " I say, and my interpreter translates, "When you think of your parents; when you think of your life before, what is it that you remember fondly? What thoughts make you smile to yourself?"

It is indeed a painful question for a boy whose parents were killed during the vicious civil strife between 1992 and 1995. Feuding Afghan warlords trying to carve up separate fiefdoms.

Fazle Allah came home from school to see his home destroyed by a rocket attack, his parents dead inside. To this day, he still doesn't know who is responsible, probably never will.

He has been at this orphanage nearly half his life now, seven years. He is 15. His brother, Shukre, has been here since he was three. We are sitting on the steps of the dormitory where the orphans live, 500 boys at this site, near central Kabul. Fazle rubs his face, but does not cry, as he struggles with the images of the past.

"I remember," he says slowly, "sitting down for dinner, eating my mother's palue (a traditional Afghan dish of rice and meat)." He pauses. "She made very good palue."

He says that he and his brother often go to bed hungry at the orphanage, at least two or three nights each week. When they do eat, it is usually mostly starches, rice and beans or potatoes.

When I do see the dining hall, I am struck at how much it looks like a scene from the movie "Oliver." A dark room with long wooden tables. Boys use their bare hands to shovel steaming rice into their mouths from scuffed aluminum bowl.

There's a line waiting near a window where a server scoops up beans from a giant pot and slops them into outstretched dishes as the boys file by. I am waiting for a barefoot waif to walk up hesitantly and say the words, "Please sir, can I have some more."

There is steam, patches of light and dirty faces, the clanking of bowls and scraping of chairs. It is so moody, so sensually rich that it is almost a chiaroscuro, a Renaissance painting of Afghan poverty. Fazle stands in the doorway watching it all. Now that he is a young man, he is fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan — almost redundant in a place like this.

There is a vocational school on the orphanage grounds. It teaches carpentry, tailoring, shoemaking and carpet weaving. Although well-intentioned, I'm sure, it seems to me like the perfect feeder pool for child labor sweatshops — or it would be, if they only had some supplies.

Inside the woodshop there are a few hammers and saws, but nothing to use them on. No wood, no nails, no nothing. Kids here enthusiastically hammer on tables and saw the air, a vaudeville skit, a slapstick show, another small absurdity in world ripped from Salvador Dali's sketchpad rejects.

In Fazle's room there is the electric brick. Right now it has a tin bucket sitting on top. A whiff of steam on the water's surface.

Though the contraption calls to mind a Chilean torture chamber during the Pinochet era, it actually seems to work. The boys will have hot water to wash with tonight.

Good thing too, a little personal hygiene goes a long way in keeping away lice and scabies, in a place where the boys have only one set of clothes: the ones on their backs.

"A second commander in the region, a former Taliban who switched sides ... tells us we have only a 20 percent chance of making it to Gahzni alive, let alone Kandahar."— Kevin Sites

Fazle's clothes are already threadbare, going into the winter months. He points to his sneakers, which are disintegrating around the seams. I ask him if he has any other clothes. He laughs, and then lifts up his mattress to show me the sum total of all his worldly possessions. Under the mattress is a black cotton vest and a toothbrush.

He has one more thing: a book of Farsi poetry. When he reads it, he says, he disappears from this place.

* * *

With reports that Kandahar will fall any day now; the conflict story is moving south. There's nothing left to report on in Kabul but politics, rebuilding and features on Marjan, the zoo's one-eyed lion.

Avila and I are eager to make a run on Kandahar. And I just got the green light from NBC's Foreign Desk to buy a 25-person bus, for exactly that purpose. It will be, I envision, a kind of Afghan Winnebago from which an advance crew can pursue this story whenever and wherever it moves. We will raise the spirit of Charles Kuralt in possibly the world's most lawless nation.

My plan is to hollow the bus out, have wooden bunks installed, desks and storage boxes for production equipment and personal gear. Local welders will attach a platform to the roof rack where a camera can shoot "beauty shots" and correspondent stand-ups from anywhere. A place where we can eat, sleep and work-without having to worry about where we're going to stay each night. Armed guards will travel with us, to ward off bandits or Taliban or both. Depending on our destination, maybe we will call it the Kandahar Express or the Tora Bora Bus.

But there are problems before we even get started. The NBC engineers are not convinced; don't like the idea of driving at all on a road that is legendary for being one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan. The road to Kandahar.

By the time we have forked over the $5,000 for the bus it is too late to have it ready in time for our morning departure. Then, our crew tells us they've heard from too many sources that this isn't even a fool's errand — it's a suicide mission.

Avila and I quietly decide to make the trip alone. We've been given permission by the local Northern Alliance commander in Maiden Shari to drive south to the city of Gahzni, a third of the way to Kandahar. With a letter of permission from him and one of his soldiers as an armed escort, we should be safe, he says, at least that far.

It is morning and we are packing the van for our journey. Though the plan is Gahzni, we both are thinking that if the path is clear, we'll make a run for Kandahar.

Despite the problems and warnings from colleagues, I'm excited for the momentum, to be moving from Kabul, which because of so much prior over stimulation, has become stale for me. I'm looking for another rush of adrenaline. Fear, I have learned, is the quickest fix.

But I also I feel some anxiety beyond the dangers we may encounter. Without a cameraman, soundman or engineer, I must now become all three. I will shoot with a mini DV camcorder and transmit using a 7E videophone. I have used them all before, but not with this kind of pressure, not without a supply line or tech support nearby.

Now we're going off into the wilds of Afghanistan again and we have nothing and no one to rely on but ourselves. While we are loading, Avila pulls me to the side.

"We need to make a pact," he says, "we need to be brutally honest with each other once we get out there." Because neither Avila nor I have a reputation for mincing words, for holding back, I am a bit surprised.

"I think you know that's not going to be a problem, Jim," I nod, continuing to pack.

Before heading out, we stop at our driver's house, Yar Momad. Yar is a tough guy, quick temper, prone to occasional fits of road rage.

Once when we were driving to a story and a bicyclist didn't move out of his way quickly enough, Yar stopped the van and confronted him. Within seconds fists were flying. I had to crawl over the front seat and out the door to break them up.

But on a trip like this, into the danger zone, we are a bit more comfortable with his edgy nature.

At his house, his 10-year-old son brings out a Kalashnikov and a harness filled with ammunition clips. He hands it to Yar who hands it to me. We have done this before. I lay it down on the backseat and cover it with my jacket.

But before I do, I see something I haven't seen before. Peeking out from one of the ammo pouches is a handle and metal ring about the circumference of a dime. My translator Ahmed sees it too. He puts two fingers to his lips and then touches them gently to the grenade.

It is the Afghan version of, "good boy, stay right where you are, please don't go anywhere."

But despite the preparation and dramatics, we don't get fifty miles outside of Kabul before we are told to turn around and go home. A second commander in the region, a former Taliban who switched sides after the fall of Maidan Shar, tells us we have only a 20 percent chance of making it to Gahzni alive, let alone Kandahar.

Maybe you try next week, he tells us in Pashto, the language of most in southern Afghanistan — and the Taliban. We are disappointed, but mildly so.

Less than three hours after we started, we are back at the Intercon, unloading the van. Our colleagues look relieved to see us. Not one says to us, "I told you so."

Six porters, varying in age from 20 to 60, wearing tattered bellhop uniforms that probably looked great in 1973. When they put down the last bag, I count out 100,000 Afghanis apiece, and place them in each of their lined, calloused and dirty hands. A fine tip, of about $1.50.

* * *

Back in Kabul, I am weary and unmotivated.

A veiled woman and child

Then I see it. A fleeting glimpse to the right. Outside the van window. A tiny, no, infinitesimal, sign. Hope.

Beneath a burka, a pair of sandals. Painted toenails. They are deep purple. Majestic, beautiful, colorful toenails. In a country draped in despair, this is the light coming seeping from under the doorway.

I don't think I'm overstating it. This is the sign, at least for me, that all is not lost. Though she is a blue ghost, though she is covered from head to toe, though she sees the world through a curtain of lace, she has proud feet. Uncovered and moving forward.

They are ignoring the dust, grime and garbage of this Kabul street. Moving past the past. But perhaps I've imbued them with too much significance. Projected onto them unrealistic meaning and metaphor. Made them iconic when actually, they are just toes. Pretty toes. Toes that, of course, can defuse landmines with every step.

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