Spectator's Journal / The View from Baluchistan
Kaplan, Robert D.
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL THE VIEW FROM BALUCHISTAN Quetta, Pakistan Looking down from 30,000 feet, Baluchistan is a series of boils and lesions on a scratched, sandpaper surface; the product of...
...Plastic beachballs, cans of Heinz soup, Japanese radios, and the most up-to-date issues of magazines such as Gentleman's Quarterly and the Washington Journalism Review are available in the shops...
...The war has deposited close to a million refugees in the surrounding desert, placing the ethnic Baluchis, a people of Middle Eastern origin, under serious threat...
...He was killed by machine gun fire in an ambush in 1985...
...As the flow of exotic goods suggests, Baluchistan is a free zone: an unregulated void of shifting identity lost among Iran, Afghanistan, and the other Pakistani provinces of Sind and Punjab, with its back to the Indian Ocean...
...And these were the lucky few who had survived the twenty-day trek to the border and the grueling drive to Quetta without dying of their injuries first...
...Even by Afghan standards, it is exceedingly dangerous...
...In order to wipe out remaining pockets of mujahedeen, the Soviets had built a road network for tanks and armored cars that effectively divided the city into small, easily patrolled sectors...
...Now that the Soviets are in Afghanistan, the Red Army has only Baluchistan to cross before reaching the warm waters near the Persian Gulf...
...Mahmoud told me that, like many refugees, he spends several months of the year as a mujahed in Afghanistan, and had just returned from the Kandahar region...
...Then it struck me: this man was not after my money, and much of what he had told me might be true...
...One of the first people I met here was Atta Mahmoud, a 28-year-old Afghan refugee, who lured me to his carpet shop where we sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping cups of green tea...
...There is not a street or a building standing...
...The only thing you can do with a Russian is slit his throat...
...But mujahedeen forces were again filtering into the area, and besieging Soviet positions...
...the product of volcanic upheavals and tectonic shifts going back two billion years...
...The Soviet ambassador in Pakistan, Vitaly Smirnov, warned in 1984 that Western journalists traveling in Afghanistan with the mujahedeen would be hunted down and killed...
...T his was as close to the story as I 1 was able to get...
...Finally, I asked the price of some of his carpets...
...The picture he drew was similar to Atta Mahmoud's, but more detailed...
...But he brushed aside my queries, saying that we could discuss carpets another day...
...A hospital for war victims, run by the International Committee of the Red Cross, was where my feet finally by Robert D. Kaplan touched solid ground...
...Just one meter of dust and new paved roads for Russian tanks and security patrols...
...deeply suspicious...
...Afghanistan's second largest city, Kandahar, with a population of 180,000 before the war, appears to have been leveled...
...And his words had the tone of a sales pitch...
...Having had previous experience with carpet dealers, I was Robert D. Kaplan is an Athens-based journalist whose book on the Ethiopian famine will be published this year by Westview Press...
...His phone was out of order and his address was vague: "near the orphanage...
...After banging on several doors I found him...
...Its single-level, unfinished cement houses are like theater props that could be ripped out at any moment by blasts of plateau wind...
...But his precise manner of speaking dispelled some of my doubts...
...The number of incoming patients—most from the Kandahar region—had doubled in 1987...
...Like the crust beneath, everything here is unstable...
...If you don't want to slit his throat you are a Communist...
...No more nut or apple trees...
...he implored with outstretched hands as if speaking to a multitude...
...The flimsiness of the setting creates an atmosphere of total unreliability...
...His marginal existence made me uncertain...
...Thousands had been killed or wounded...
...Because the flat desert terrain makes it difficult to hide from helicopter gunships, Kandahar is one region where the Soviets are able to keep their word...
...Kandahar city is no more, no more I tell you...
...The surgeons were working non-stop...
...What are reputed to be the wildest elements of the Afghan mujahedeen use Quetta as their rear base...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 23...
...The corridors were packed with real people whose bodies had been torn up by bullets, mortar fire, and mine debris...
...Helping them are numerous informers for Afghan state intelligence, Khad, who watch the handful of small hotels in Quetta, on the lookout for Westerners trying to make contact with the resistance...
...This seemed so horrible that I didn't know how to react, or whether even to believe him...
...The situation at other local hospitals was much the same...
...The day I visited there were 103 patients, and since the hospital had room for only sixty at the time, tents had been set up on the lawn...
...Kandahar, only 150 miles to the northwest, is no place for journalists...
...It will never be recorded in our memory, the way violence of a lesser magnitude in South Africa and Sri Lanka will be...
...His eyes were crazed and untrustworthy beneath a black, green, and gold turban...
...Mojaddidi stated flatly that the current round of fighting in Kandahar, going on since May 1987, was the most savage in all of Afghanistan...
...I wanted more specifics, but he was hard to interrupt and his orations soon disintegrated into a mad tirade, most of it incomprehensible...
...It happened in secret, with barely a word of news coverage...
...I remember one little boy with a head injury who was shrieking in terror as a nurse shaved off his hair in preparation for surgery...
...Charles Thornton of the Arizona Republic was one of the few American journalists to have crossed into Afghanistan from here...
...The only available witnesses are here in Quetta, a place, like others in this world, beyond the frontiers of our very limited and censored reality...
...Except for the carpets on the floor, the room he lived in was totally bare...
...Quetta, the regional capital, is built on the ruins of a 1935 earthquake...
...The Soviets were now trying to win back local sympathies through a massive rebuilding campaign...
...No bazaars...
...This was later backed up by conversations I had with Western diplomats...
...Aerial bombardment by Soviet planes had apparently reduced Kandahar to rubble...
...He mentioned that his two small sons were killed in a Russian artillery bombardment of Kandahar in March 1986...
...Quetta is being taken over by exiles from Kandahar, an Afghan city that has been overrun by the Red Army...
...T next went to see Zia Mojaddidi, a I former faculty member at Kabul University and the local stringer for the Voice of America, because he had a reputation for being the most reliable source of information in Quetta...
...Once on the ground, one's feeling of being lost in space persists: a visitor is apt to distrust much of what he sees and hears...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
