Jeanne Bryer
It was an ordinary day until an Afghan friend alerted me to a shooting in the Kabul maternity hospital, leaving mothers, babies and nurses dead and injured. The shooters had been dressed in Afghan police uniforms. I read the news with mounting horror whilst trying to comprehend what kind of person commits the heinous crime of deliberately targeting new mothers and their babies. To kill or not to kill babies was never a question; it was a coldly calculated act and the attackers ‘shot the women methodically’. This was no indiscriminate scattergun approach to killing and officials say that a total of 24 people were killed, 20 injured and most of them were patients. The murderers were eventually shot dead by Afghan security forces.
The fiends who committed this crime perpetrated the ultimate in terrorist attacks. Nothing instills more fear than the threat to a people’s young, for they are the future. And how desperately poignant that one of the babies killed was called Omid; in English this means Hope. Now hope is just a word in Afghanistan since the so-called ‘peace process’ has not born fruit but instead is reaping a grim harvest.
In another attack committed the same day, more people were killed in the eastern province of Nangahar at a funeral where people had gathered to mourn the death of a local police commander. The death toll may be as many as 34 with another 58 mourners injured.
Who were the perpetrators in these attacks from cradle to grave? Can they be found and brought to justice? It is doubtful, despite the aftermath of these crimes bringing condemnation from US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo who is urging the Taliban and the Afghan government to work together ‘to bring the perpetrators to justice,’ saying that the shooting of mothers and their babies was an ‘act of sheer evil’.
Afghanistan is confronted with conflicts that seem impossible to resolve, despite conferences, millions of dollars spent, powerful world leaders involving personnel who made pledges, and non-governmental organisations who distributed their cash and ideals. Is the phrase ‘lessons learned’ a cliché now? How much has really been understood and acted upon? There can be no peace without security, no security without the Rule of Law, military and police forces that can effectively ensure both, and a Justice system to support it all. And as US policies change with the political weather the hopes of a stable and democratic Afghan government fade. We have had the double puzzle of i) two men claiming their rights to Presidential power and ii) the US restoring to prominence and power the very enemy they had ousted. You could not make it up.
We are still unsure who committed these latest crimes with the Taliban denying them and many pointing to Daesh as the likely perpetrators because they often target Shia Muslims and both atrocities were upon this group. But President Ghani had resumed operations against the Taliban and other militant groups as the peace process faltered yet again.
A Tale of Two Presidents
Amid these disintegrating hopes of peace, the Covid 19 virus continues to claim its victims, sweeping indiscriminately throughout the country. Yet, while it mercifully leaves children relatively unscathed, human attackers showed no such mercy in Kabul, where ‘women and children first’ just took on a tragic new meaning.
It has been 18 long years since 9/11 when the US led an international coalition of forces that ousted the Taliban from power. During this period there has been an unstoppable toll of civilian deaths and of military personnel, precise numbers being hard to identify apart from them being in their tens of thousands.
Who are the perpetrators now? Taliban, Daesh, greedy warlords, power crazy gun wielding misogynists? Probably all of these and more.
As we try to disentangle the maze of Afghanistan, where the shifting sands of alliances float away like smoke signals or become undecipherable like a long-lost language, international players and Afghans will need to do more than learn each other’s languages. It is no good knowing and being able to speak a language without understanding the hidden cultural essentials of meaning. Who is trying to gain political capital? Answer – everyone. While innocents are killed the politicians, warlords and power brokers play a deadly game of cat and mouse.
But the Afghan government has been crippled by its inability even to work with itself – while Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani have both vied for power and who have both declared they are the rightful President. It begs the question. How could they work with each other to defeat the common enemy if they cannot even work with each other for the common good of the Afghan people?
But in a faint glimmer of something akin to hope, the latest, positive, shift comes with the announcement that Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah have signed a power sharing deal, so maybe this will herald genuine cooperation. Abdullah will now head peace talks with the Taliban. This is another change of position when just a few days earlier, the Ashraf Ghani government’s National Security Advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, tweeted “There seems little point in continuing to engage Taliban in ‘peace talks’.” The US had blamed Daesh for the atrocities and cite the fact that Daesh often targets the Shia minority for their killings.
Instead of infighting the challenge for the government should now be to concentrate on creating a protective ring around vulnerable buildings and areas like hospitals and schools to shield them from such malign attacks and extend security throughout the country.
Britain’s Jeanne Bryer is a freelancer, specializing in Afghanistan, for over a decade. She traveled to Kabul when the Taliban were in power, interviewing women and getting their stories. She worked for the British and Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group for four years producing security and humanitarian reports, working with the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief in Kabul. She produced the AfghanLinks e-newsletter for four years (now discontinued) and has been a member of the Front Line Club for independent journalists since its opening in 2003. She can be reached at: afghanlinks@aol.com. Some other publications where Jeanne’s work has appeared in is the Middle East Magazine, W-eNews and inExile.
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