Who Rules Afghanistan (Page 7)

The poppy crop has already been harvested, but some of the local farmers show me big brown blocks of opium and offer me hash. They say that drought and hunger forced them to grow poppy. "Hazrat Ali controls the smuggling," says one of them. The malik Askar Khan explains, "There are no schools and no clinics in our district. The NGOs just spend money on themselves. When people are hungry they commit sins. If we only grow wheat, we will starve."

The men allege that Mirwais Yasini, head of Afghanistan's Counter Narcotics Directorate, has a deal with Hazrat Ali. When the harvest is done, Hazrat Ali tells the farmers to burn their fields, then Mirwais Yasini can tell the British (who are officially charged with running a war on poppy) that progress is being made. Counternarcotics officials in Kabul vigorously deny these charges.

The trip back to Kabul is as slow and dusty as the trip out. After a few hours of driving we see an overloaded passenger bus with luggage stacked on the roof. The vehicle sways and bounces toward us. Then it sways just a bit too far and topples over the edge of the road into a gully below. A cloud of dust rises and momentarily obscures the wreck.

The bus sits on its roof. Three men are trapped beneath it. About a dozen other people lie around in various states of injury: a young man limps by, his crushed foot wrapped in a bloody scarf. An old man lies by the road moaning. The men underneath the bus are dying; the crowd is growing frantic.

"Help! Push the bus! My brother is trapped," begs a desperate man from down in the gully. The trapped men are migrant laborers, Afghan refugees whose families live in Pakistan. The crowd of men starts pushing the bus back and forth, hoping to tip it one more rotation. But chaos and panic reign, there is no coordination to the effort and the bus weighs too much. A flatbed truck tries to back into an edge of the bus to flip it over but it is no use. The trapped men are being crushed. Someone says one has just died.

The whole debacle is a pathetically fitting, if clichéd, microcosm of Afghanistan's current state: The bus and these people mean little to the great powers that have appointed themselves masters of this place. Out here in the desert and mountains there is no democracy, no nation building, no NGOs, no American patrols--only an appallingly bad road that once, long ago, was a paved link to the world and one of Afghanistan's few symbols of modernity and national progress. Now the only sign of something like state power is a local commander's young gunman with a bayonet on his AK-47. He commandeers a car and orders it to take one of the wounded back to Jalalabad.

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