Afghans Cavalier About Landmines
Bagram, Afghanistan, April 11, 2002 (AP)

By Michelle Boorstein

This time it starts out soberly, with Mustafa exhibiting an inch-long scar buried in his whiskers, from when his tank blew up last year. Then come stories of mines daringly dismantled for the precious fuel inside, mine parts used for ashtrays and to hold sugar in the kitchen. Within minutes, the young men are giggling, rattling off stories of how they ran through minefields and lived to tell about it.

In the most heavily mined patch of one of the world's most heavily mined countries, these insidious devices have dug their way into the local culture - one that sometimes dismisses them as nuisances to be ignored or, worse, turns them into a chance to prove male daring.

"Afghan people are very brave - they don't care about their lives," said Safa, one of dozens of Afghans working at Bagram, a former Soviet base in central Afghanistan (news - web sites) where thousands of allied soldiers now live. Playing with mines and showing they are unafraid, he says, is how Afghans deal with having to live with the explosives.

In their daily work clearing mines from the base, Army specialists describe Afghans doing everything from juggling and jumping up and down on mines to clanging them together to prove they know when they will go off.

"We learned quickly that we stand between them and the ordnance," said Capt. Rob Mitchell, commander of one of \ three groups of Army mine-clearing experts.

The casual attitude of some Afghans appears to stem from both necessity and the psychology of war.

It's common around Bagram for people to dismantle mines to get at the explosives inside. The white, waxy material can be placed between a few bricks, set on fire and used to cook food or for heat. The material inside mines doesn't necessarily explode from fire; it's pressure that makes it blow.

Sometimes it's the only fuel to be found in this parched, treeless landscape.

"There were no dry sticks - I had to," says 21-year-old Mashoq, eliciting knowing nods from Mustafa and the others.

Not every story about local mine buffs ends well. In one, a group of people were trying to remove the paraffin explosive from a mine by beating it with sticks. Then "something went wrong and those people went away," was how a man from Bagram relayed the situation, Mitchell said.

Soldiers attached to Baba Jan, the local warlord, guard an old ammunition storage area on base that is jammed with mines and other live ordnance left over two decades by the Soviets, the Taliban and the northern alliance. While the area is incredibly dangerous, and several Afghans have died in recent explosions there, the guards are there because Afghans sneak in at night in order to steal aluminum to sell for scrap.

So cautious are the Army experts about Afghans and mines that they carry a little phrase book in the Dari language with some key expressions, including: "Stop!" "Don't touch that!" and "Get away!"

There are various theories about the psychology of all this.

Nowday, one of Mustafa's friends, says people who play with mines are "crazy people who don't want to live." Safa says they are uneducated, and that their views are the product of war and extreme poverty.

Staff Sgt. William P. Spencer, an explosives expert who works with Mitchell, says he has seen a similar attitude in other places where war has woven itself into daily life: Rwanda, Kosovo and the Korean Peninsula, among them.

"These people get used to the fact that they might die tomorrow. They've been at war for so long, they expect it. It's going to happen to them sooner or later, so why worry about it?" says Spencer, who is based at Fort McNair in Washington.

But Spencer says he's never seen what he calls machismo like that of the Afghans.

They know it's dangerous, he says. "The knowing's not the issue. It's the caring that's the problem."

Copyright © 2002 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.