"Trip to Afghanistan"
Chip Duncan
Sunday, September 18th 2005

In his book God Has A Dream, Bishop Desmond Tutu says:

If you are to be true partners with God in the transformation of his world … you must begin by understanding that as much as God loves you, God equally loves your enemies.

I’m a documentary filmmaker with a focused eye for my subject, but on issues in which I’m not personally involved, I’m just like most people. I see the images, I read the words, but it’s often little more than information. The details are lost because people and events are so rarely humanized. We learn from walking in another’s shoes, yet the shoes of an Afghan or Iraqi civilian so rarely seem to fit the average American.

That changed for me in late April of this year when my business partner, Sir Ben Kingsley and I embarked on a goodwill mission to Afghanistan. As global ambassadors for the international relief agency Save the Children, our job was to witness, to experience and to report.

As we flew north in a small prop plane from the Afghan capital of Kabul to the city of Maimana, I admit that my thoughts had more to do with Osama bin Laden than the children we were there to visit. I couldn’t get over how vast and rugged the Hindu Kush mountains were. He could be anywhere, I thought, absolutely anywhere.

Though villages hugged each valley and waterway, there were few roads, and most were barely passable. Many of the villages are snowed in during winter, making transportation on anything but foot nearly impossible. In the deserts further north, food and water are scarce and most who travel do it on the backs of horses or camels.

After our brief flight, local workers from Save the Children greeted us on the gravel runway. We spent an hour at a security briefing, then began our journey. During the next week, we covered nearly a thousand kilometers in a caravan of Toyota 4x4s. The roads varied from single lane asphalt to sand two tracks and, for miles at a time, riverbeds. Some were bone dry. Others nearly swallowed our vehicles.

I’ve traveled and photographed throughout the developing world, but little compares with Afghanistan. In part, that’s because it’s a war torn country filled with battle scars. But even more than that, it’s because of the extremes of poverty.

One of the few good things to come from Hurricane Katrina is that it revealed the face of poverty in America to many who were unaware of its existence. What makes it uniquely sad here is that we don’t have an excuse. We haven’t been occupied by foreign powers for more than a generation. We haven’t been living under tyranny for nearly as long. Our citizens, and especially women, have not been tortured by their own government and denied even the most basic human rights.

In the US, poverty is a political issue … and we can solve it. But in Afghanistan, poverty is a way of life for nearly everyone … and solutions are slow in coming.

Imagine three decades of warfare - an entire generation of fighting that included Soviet occupation and the long civil war between the Mujahadeen, the Taliban, and various warlords whose loyalties change quickly, often based on who’s paying and who’s not.

During our short visit, we were exposed to the trials of war, and to the humanity and perseverance it can inspire. At a dinner in Mazar-i-Sharif, I sat next to an Afghan worker for Save the Children. While the group ate and chatted, he shared his story with me, mostly in a pained whisper.

He had lost three brothers during the civil war. With the city in virtual lockdown due to days of street fighting between the Mujahadeen and the Taliban, he’d run out of food for his children. He knew if he went to the market alone, he’d be killed. So he did what may seem unthinkable, he took his 3-year-old daughter with him in his arms. Together, he thought, they’d be safe. There were some morals, he said, even in war. No one wanted to shoot a young girl. He was able to save his daughter’s life because she saved his.

Since November, 2001 the war has changed dramatically. Following the invasion in pursuit of bin Laden, al Qaeda and leaders of the Taliban government, the US has scaled back considerably. Today, approximately 20,000 US soldiers lead the coalition forces, mostly in fighting to the south and east of Kabul along the Pakistani border.

Despite the distances we covered and the time we spent in Kabul, we never saw a single American serviceman. Considering we were traveling with a non-profit relief agency and without weapons or armed security, it was probably for the best. But the remnants of fighting are everywhere - from bombed out buildings to the thousands of scattered tanks and troop carriers lining the roads. There’s a resiliency that’s apparent on the faces of the adults, and the children are just that, children. We saw them playing in the burned out shells of helicopters and tanks, running after bandaged soccer balls, and bouncing along potholed roads on rickety bicycles welded together with an array of used parts.

The danger, however, is everywhere. The 2005 State of the World’s Mothers Report recently issued by Save the Children lists Afghanistan as the most dangerous country in the world for a child. Chasing a soccer ball can, literally, kill a child.

A generation of war left behind an estimated five to seven million land mines – among the most of any nation in the world. There are mines from the Soviets, mines from the Mujahadeen, mines from the Taliban, and mines from coalition forces. The fields and villages are also full of unexploded ordinance, much of it from coalition forces.

The challenge of land mines may be even more insidious than the numbers indicate. Afghanistan suffers from a combination of spring storms and flooding. With each rapid snowmelt, a phenomenon known as “mine migration” happens as mines are literally washed randomly from place to place. International efforts to remove land mines are underway, but mine migration heightens the challenge.

During our visit, daily security briefings reinforced the idea that walking off the road - any road - could result in injury or death from land mines. Whether walking home from school, herding livestock, or working in the fields, children are at constant risk.

Still, landmines represent only a fraction of the risk to children. Poor health care, malnutrition, a shortage of clean water, lack of immunizations and access to education further the challenge. For every 1000 Afghan children born, 165 die within the first year. By comparison, fewer than 7 out of 1000 children born in the United States die within the first year. The maternal mortality rate is also among the world’s worst - 1600 women die out of every 100,000 live births.

Making it through the first year of life doesn’t necessarily improve the odds of survival for a child. Save the Children estimates that 1 out of 4 Afghan children dies before reaching age 5, usually from a preventable disease. Globally, nearly 30,000 children under age 5 die each day, often from preventable or treatable causes such as malnutrition and diarrhea due to unsafe water. In Afghanistan, however, deaths from HIV-AIDS and malaria, two diseases that plague much of sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, are less likely killers. In other words, many of the causes of death of an Afghan child are more easily preventable.

Staggering though the statistics can be, there is hope - for Afghanistan and for much of the developing world. And that hope lies in the education of girls.

There are few if any governmental regimes that have treated women worse than the Taliban did from 1996 through 2001. Women were not just dominated by men, they were frequently tortured and killed for minor infractions. Wearing nail polish could result in having toes cut off. Showing up in public without wearing the burka could result in having a nose sliced flat against the face. A woman accused of adultery was punished by death, usually by stoning in a public place - a practice that continues in parts of rural Afghanistan even after the fall of the Taliban.

Many of the practices affecting women continue today, including multiple and arranged marriages, often involving girls as young as 13.

Slowly, however, after a lifestyle molded by the constant insecurity of war and poverty, communities are beginning to embrace change. Our small delegation was witness to what many believe represents Afghanistan’s greatest hope for the future.

On a Saturday morning in a village roughly 50 kilometers north of Kabul, we witnessed the re-opening of a village school closed by the Taliban. Hundreds of children were entering classes, and for the girls, it was their first day of school … ever. A large delegation of Afghan men was there for the opening ceremony. The only adult women in attendance were the workers from Save the Children, women who had risked their lives providing aid during the reign of the Taliban.

A local politician spoke, hammering his fist and raising his voice at all the key moments. A school administrator spoke, smiling his gentle smile. And then, at a podium nearly twice her size, 12-year-old Roshan, whose name means “light,” read a speech on behalf of all the young female students. She was going to school. And though she didn’t know it, she was changing Afghanistan.

In the northern village of Belcheragh, we watched Save the Children staff educating adults and children in basic health care and personal hygiene. We attended a school built by local citizens with resources from Save the Children that included scores of girls attending classes for the first time. And in a village north of Mazar-i-Sharif, we photographed the first class of young women being trained as community midwives, the first step in an effort to reduce the high maternal death rate.

The seemingly insurmountable challenges in Afghanistan do have solutions. Educating women and especially girls paves the way. From South Korea to Costa Rica to Kenya, it’s been proven that the more education girls receive, the more likely it is that they’ll grow to be mothers who are healthy and empowered. Educated girls are more likely to postpone marriage and pregnancy until they’re able to handle both with resources and maturity. Educated girls opt to have fewer children and, when they do have children, they’re more likely to be resourceful in providing food and education for their own kids.

Not long after I left Afghanistan, an international aid worker for CARE was kidnapped from her car in Kabul. An internet café near the Save the Children compound was bombed, leaving two dead. It’s a way of life in Afghanistan.

The risk to aid workers is extraordinary. They work in remote areas without security or weapons. The faces of the dying are everywhere. In Afghanistan, Sudan, Mali, Rwanda, Haiti, Bolivia and a score of developing nations, Save the Children, CARE, Doctors Without Borders and hundreds of local non-governmental organizations work every day to provide food, health care, clean water and immunizations for children and adults. But it’s not a thankless task. Change is happening. With action and commitment to the empowerment of girls and women everywhere, the world of the future will be rich in rewards.

Before I conclude my remarks today, I wanted to make a very personal comment about religion, in part because I’ve witnessed the beauty of faith and religious practices in many different parts of the world.

We’re gathered today in a Christian church and we’re talking about the largely Muslim nation of Afghanistan. In Afghanistan today, virtually everyone who professes a faith is Muslim. Under the Taliban, if you didn’t profess to being a Muslim … and in particular a conservative, fundamentalist Muslim … the likelihood is that you were tortured or killed.

Today, September 18th, 2005, is election day in Afghanistan. It’s hard to know whether democracy will catch on … or whether freedom will be a lasting ideal for what is a diverse, tribal society. My own hope is that no matter what form of government takes root in Afghanistan that two things will result from the intervention there by coalition forces. First … it is my hope that the empowerment of girls and women will succeed, and that positive change will soon follow. And second … it is my hope that there be real religious tolerance and that the values of that tolerance will be rooted in law.

The days of fighting and dying over our differing perceptions of God and religion must end.

I’d like to conclude with a final passage from Bishop Tutu’s book, God Has A Dream. It says:

God does not share our hatred, no matter what the offense we have endured. We try to claim God for ourselves and for our cause, but God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or religion. And our prejudices, regardless of whether they are based on religion, race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or anything else, are absolutely and utterly ridiculous in God’s eyes.