U.S. News & World Report

Afghanistan

Afghanistan's Kama District is a moonscape: mile after mile of parched, rocky barrenness punctuated by craggy outcroppings that are the ruins of bombed-out mud homes. Until a few weeks ago, Kama was empty, its former residents all in exile in Pakistan. But then a Swedish agency began a crash program of clearing the irrigation canals that used to make Kama a prime source of grain, fruit and sugar cane for Afghanistan and for the Soviet Union. When news of the water project reached Pakistan, the refugees of Kama began renting trucks to go home.

After 16 hours on the road, through the cinematic Khyber Pass and past the wrecked tanks, crumbled buildings and withered orchards of eastern Afghanistan, Mohammed Alam and 45 of his relatives pulled up at what once was the grandest compound in Kama District's Sada village. Roofs had caved in, the fortresslike walls had collapsed and windows were shattered. But what distressed Alam most was his cement-hard, bomb-cratered fields. ''I left green farmland, and now it's a desert," he mourned.

The women of Alam's family took only minutes to get rope beds laid out and dinner cooking amid the debris in their courtyard. The men will rush to prepare their land for planting. If the water does not flow again, they will wait for rain. Their cash on hand amounts to 16 Pakistani rupees, or 60 cents, so until their crop comes in, they will seek work anywhere they can find it, including back in Pakistan.

It is the resilience of the Alams and millions like them that leads relief officials to predict that although Afghanistan has the world's biggest refugee population (almost 5 million), its most devastated terrain (littered with 10 million land mines) and the globe's most dismal demographics, including the lowest literacy rates and life expectancy, the Afghans will make it. The United Nations is betting on the Afghans' survival instinct by making self-help the guiding principle of the biggest U.N.-assisted repatriation in history.

Money and wheat. When an Afghan family checks out of a U.N.-supported refugee camp, it gets $ 130 in cash and 660 pounds of wheat -- enough to last for three or four months. Everything else -- transportation, housing, resettlement -- is the responsibility of the refugees. ''It's empowerment," explains Rob Breen, chief repatriation officer in Peshawar, Pakistan. ''They're making all their own decisions, and they're not waiting for us."

Since the fall of the communist government in Kabul last spring, some 1.2 million Afghans have made their way home from Pakistan, about four times as many as the U.N. Office of High Commissioner for Refugees had bargained for. (An additional 235,000 had left Pakistan earlier and some 250,000 went back from Iran.)

The key factor in the refugees' decisions to return is confidence that their home areas are peaceful at last. The great majority who left Pakistan this year knew their villages were safe because, after the Soviets pulled out, they had sent men back to check out their homes and start working their land.

Some local guerrilla commanders are commandeering unoccupied land for their own followers. So reclaiming land is one reason refugees are hurrying home. Another is that Pakistan has begun reducing food and water supplies in the camps, and the refugees have rightly interpreted this as a signal that they have worn out their welcome.

Preparing the land is the returnees' top priority; repairing their houses comes second. Homewardbound refugees almost invariably bring roof beams removed from the houses they built in exile as well as furniture, carpets and food, both in sacks and on the hoof. Some also take exhumed corpses of relatives to be reburied in their native soil.

Many of the 2 million Afghan refugees who remain in Pakistan, including an estimated half million who never registered with the U.N., are hanging back because of worries about mines, land disputes or factional fighting. Still, the U.N. expects 1.5 million more to return after the snows melt next year. Those opting to stay in Pakistan will include trucking tycoons and drug dealers as well as the most vulnerable -- widows and the disabled.

All of Afghanistan is not as devastated as Kama and other districts around Jalalabad, where some of the fiercest battles of the 12-year war were fought. But as the world's third-poorest country, it is at the bottom of the heap by almost every measure except opium production, where it vies with Burma as the top producer. Some fundamentalist tribal leaders and guerrilla commanders are banning poppy growing as un-Islamic, and the U.N. puts anti-poppy clauses in all its aid contracts; Kama signed such an agreement for its canal project. Enforcing anti-drug strategies, however, requires a strong central government, and Afghanistan has no such thing. So experts are certain that as returnees look for quick moneymakers, a poppy boom is inevitable. So is increasing heroin addiction in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Afghans have other survival strategies. Most refugee families are leaving one or more wage earners behind in Pakistan. Seasonal migration to Pakistan, Iran and the Persian Gulf has long been a way for Afghan subsistence farmers to get by. Mercenary work also is available. ''Men who don't want to fight but can't find other jobs are rejoining mujeheddin armies; some are even taking bribes to change sides,"explains an Afghan worker in Peshawar.

If the fighting continues, Afghanistan's prospects are bleak; with peace, they are merely dim. One U.N. official predicts that the country will not be ready to start real economic development for a generation.

A leading Afghan agronomist, Azam Gul, argues that although food production is now half prewar levels, with adequate aid and security the country could feed itself in five to six years. The U.N. thinks even 10 years is optimistic because Afghanistan will never again attract as much aid as it did when Kabul was extracting money from both sides of the cold war.

Afghanistan already is feeling the cold winds of international indifference. The U.N. is spending some $ 100 million in Afghanistan, compared with almost $ 3 billion in Cambodia, which has half of Afghanistan's population and a tenth as many refugees. A third of the U.N. workers clearing Afghan minefields had to be put on unpaid leave until Japan came through with a temporary bailout. But the biggest donor by far for Afghan relief has been the United States.

Now, as snow shuts roads and airports, much of northern Afghanistan is facing a food and fuel crisis like Sarajevo's. The U.N. is appealing for $ 17.6 million to help the Afghans, particularly newly returned and newly displaced refugees, weather the next few months. Without this aid, cold and starvation will take their toll, and one of history's hardest-won homecomings could shift into reverse.