PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Jamshed fiddled with a black plastic bag
that held his most treasured possession – a prosthetic eyeball.

“I had this artificial eye once, but now it does not work,”
he said.

Six years ago, half of Jamshed’s life, he saw something
sticking up alongside a dusty road in central Afghanistan.

“I thought it was a pen,” he recalled. “I pulled it out.”

It was a land mine. The explosion ripped off his right hand
and wrist. Shards shot into his forehead and left eye.

Now, Jamshed wanders with other Afghan invalids – all missing
limbs – scuffing through the orange dust in an adobe Afghan
settlement.

As the United States continues to bomb Afghanistan, with
prospects of a ground war ahead, the issue of civilian casualties
has become one of the most volatile in the debate over President
Bush’s war on terrorism. “Collateral damage” in the language of
the military means, in Afghanistan, lost lives and limbs to people
too poor to get adequate care.

In Afghanistan, civilians continue to be maimed by the legacy
of fighting long ended.

Afghans for a decade battled troops of the Soviet Union,
which invaded their country in 1979. The Soviets and their
supporters scattered between 5 million and 10 million land mines
throughout the country, few of which have been cleared out.

Areas bordering Pakistan, and the Kabul region where Jamshed
was injured, are among the most heavily mined, according to the
group Physicians Against Land Mines.

When the Soviets left, internal factions battled. The Taliban
took power in 1996 and still is fighting the Northern Alliance,
which the U.S. supports.

In 1998, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar
supported a world ban on land mines, condemning them as
“un-Islamic and anti-human.” Recently, however, organizations
working to get rid of mines criticized Omar’s ruling Taliban for
obstructing their work.

Internationally funded efforts cleared 2,791 anti-person and
anti-tank land mines from Afghanistan last year and, according to
several anti-land-mine groups, casualties dropped by about half
since 1999 to fewer than three a day earlier this year.

But Physicians Against Land Mines notes, “Recent unconfirmed
reports indicate that the flow of refugees through mine-affected
areas has substantially increased this number.”

Another result of the U.S. bombing campaign is that efforts
to remove mines are on hold. On Oct. 9, the second night of U.S.
bombing, four Afghan mine clearance workers were killed when a
bomb hit the building they were in east of Kabul.

Learning to improvise

All of which brings customers to Shamsul Haq, a leading
Afghan prosthetics dealer with clinics in the Afghan cities of
Kabul and Jalalabad, and in Peshawar. He said many can’t afford to
replace lost limbs with artificial ones.

“For one arm, the price is 15,000 rupees,” or about $250,
said Haq, 48. “This is too difficult for Afghan people. Most have
been living with no home or land for 23 years.”

Throughout the Soviet occupation and the civil war, he
supplied hundreds of people with arms, legs, hands, feet, hips,
corsets that support broken backs – “87 different devices for the
human body,” he says.

International Red Cross workers helped train Haq, whose
customers have ranged from a 1-year-old boy whose leg was blown
off by a Russian bomb to a man from Kandahar, Afghanistan, who
lost both legs and an arm last year.

The man’s brother wheeled him in, Haq said, and presented a
note from Taliban leader Omar: “Please make him feet and a hand.”

“If American ground troops come, American people will need
amputations, and more Afghan people will need amputations,” Haq
figured. “They will lose their feet and hands.”

With so many impoverished people in need of his services, Haq
sometimes supplies arms and legs at reduced rates. Instead of
offering only imported products from Germany and Britain that cost
up to $1,000, he designed a hinged lower leg using cheap steel
piping that costs only $83.

Bombing sand, not people

Haq’s cousin Abdul Ghafoor, 36, a factory owner in Kabul who
had just entered Pakistan over a mountain pass last week with his
5-year-old son, Taher, said the U.S. bombing is not inflicting
widespread casualties. Many bombs dropped by Americans appear to
be hitting hilltops and deserts, he said, not people.

Ghafoor added that Taliban forces set lanterns and campfires
on some out-of-the-way ridges as decoys. U.S. warplanes “bomb and
bomb and bomb,” Ghafoor said, “but they only get one or two
people.”

If the war moves to the ground, many civilian casualties
likely would have to be treated within Afghanistan. Pakistan
continues to block official border crossings. The only way out is
over mountain passes that require climbing or riding on donkeys.

Haq plans to be ready for any influx. When a customer comes
in, first his men measure their limbs, then show various materials
and models. Then they go to work with saws, drills, files. Dust
and fiberglass shavings soften the shop’s cement floor. Boys hang
about and fetch drinks for people waiting.

Beyond limbs, Haq said, he tries to help heal souls. He
offers words from the Koran justifying struggles against those who
would hurt Muslim people.

“When we are victimized by aggression, then we are supposed
to fight,” he says. “You may have lost something. On your death,
God will make you a whole human being.”

That sort of consolation seldom reaches the Shamshatu
settlement southeast of Peshawar, where a dozen Afghan amputees
recently gathered outside a makeshift mosque that serves as a
refugee town center.

All lost at least one limb in the war with the Soviets. Most
had crutches. Few had functioning artificial limbs. One man’s leg
healed bent in half – never treated.

“I’d climbed up in the top of a tree,” said Mohammad Kasim, a
former commander who lost his right leg fighting Soviet forces on
a road between Kabul and Jalalabad. A helicopter approached. “I
was trying to shoot down the helicopter. Then it shot me.”

In this group, the 12-year-old Jamshed is the youngest victim.

“I need money,” he said.

Not so much for an arm or a leg, he said, but for medical
attention to stop a near-constant stinging in his empty eye
socket.

“I’m in pain,” Jamshed said, voice rising faintly in the
wind. “I just want my pain to end.”

For more information

In Afghanistan, where people have coped with warfare for two
decades prior to the U.S. bombing campaign, land mines are an
enormous threat. UNICEF estimates that Afghanistan ranks sixth in
the world for land mines per square mile. Here are some websites
where you can learn more.

Two UNICEF sites have statistics and overview information:

www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/hidekill.htm

www.unicef.org/graca/mines.htm

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines has information at
www.icbl.org/

Physicians Against Land Mines is at www.banmines.org/ and has
a fact page on Afghanistan: www.cirnetwork.org/news/lmfacts.htm

The Landmine Survivors Network, whose work in Bosnia was
publicized in August 1997 by Diana, princess of Wales:
www.landminesurvivors.org/