As I read of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and President Obama's dilemma regarding an ongoing procedure for American action, the rational pros and cons slip away as I remember a day on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1980.
I was teaching in Bahrain and a visit to Pakistan offered a favorable destination for Christmas vacation. Adding interest was the news which seethed with accounts of Soviet attacks on Afghan villages and the plight of refugees. Pakistan, with financial help from oil-rich Arab countries and the United States, was setting up refugee camps on the plains below the Torkham crossing in the middle of those two countries. I wanted to do more than read the newspapers-I wanted to see for myself. My husband had a car in Pakistan and we set out for the border.
We drove across the plains of Punjab, past the thousands of refugee tents, until we reached Peshawar which fit my image of a town on the raw and violent American frontier. Very different dress, of course, but the same ubiquitous guns, small blacksmith shops, horses and wagons (along with many pickup trucks for a contemporary touch), and streets crowded with an often bearded, rough-looking male population.
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We did not linger there, both because of our time limits and the ordinarily inhospitable atmosphere, but set out on the Kyber Pass to Afghanistan. This part of the trip brought back all the images from books on British expeditions that fell to ambushes on this narrow path in the middle of overlooking mountains. Finding occasional small observation posts or forts high on the hills, I could dream the chill of foreboding British troops must have felt as they moved forward.
When we arrived at the border in the middle of Pakistan and Afghanistan late that morning, I met with a scene of chaos. A small guard post containing a Pakistani soldier marked each side of a dirt path about the width of a two lane road. The soldiers were casually smoking while they talked to Pakistani pickup drivers arriving from the refugee camps and seemed oblivious to the steady throng of citizen entering their country from Afghanistan. The Afghan terrain sloped beyond the post, and I saw an unbroken line of humanity stretching for miles. No vehicles, no horses, no wagons-only citizen walking.
As they approached and crossed the border, I saw practically all were women with small children. Their faces had a blank look of greatest exhaustion as if they had concentrated plainly on curious transmit mile after mile for hours. I was particularly struck by one house group: a young woman carrying a baby while two young children clung onto her tunic. She was one of few accompanied by her husband who carried a toddler. When I raised my camera to take their picture, the man shouted at me, so I plainly watched as he negotiated with a pickup driver on the charge for driving the house down to the refugee camps.
When an agreement was reached, the pickup, loaded with this house and several others, started down the pass. After boosting his house up into the truck, the man turned and walked into Afghanistan without Finding back.
I watched this human drama for several hours, struggling to grasp of conception of a non-existent border. Finally the temptation was too much and I walked past the guard and into Afghanistan. I had walked perhaps fifteen feet when I heard the guard shouting and turned. I didn't need a translator to know that he was telling me to come back, but to be sure I obeyed, he turned to my husband and shouted at him. So I came back, and my venture into that war-torn nation ended.
I have carried the memory of that day for the decades since. I can still see, in memory, the faces marked by suffering beyond tears, beyond fear of whatever lay behind them, focused only on survival and safety for their children. I am burdened with the knowledge that this was only a few hours of one day, and that the suffering has prolonged day after day for thirty years.
The Afghan-Pakistan Border in 1980See Also : todays world news headlines
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