Dispatches from Afghanistan
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SEPTEMBER 18, 2004 - GOING TO THE DOGS
The brave and highly-skilled Afghan demining organizations implementing UN mine-removal programs are engaged in the difficult and dangerous struggle to clear the land of explosive remnants of the past 30 years of shooting, shelling, booby-trapping, and bombing. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of unexploded shells, bullets, rockets, cluster bombs (known collectively as UXO, or unexploded ordnance), and anti-personnel and anti-tank mines contaminate acre upon acre of Afghanistan's farmland, villages, and roads.
Even with millions of dollars in UN-managed monies pouring into the mine clearance efforts that have been underway here for almost 20 years, it is likely that Afghans not yet born will be the first to live in a mine-free (or mine-managed ) country since 1979. Until then, all Afghans live in the shadow of the valley of death.
Literally.
As of 2001, according to the Landmine Monitor, less than a third of Afghanistan was NOT mine-affected. The latest figures I have seen suggest that several hundred people a month are killed or wounded by a mine or UXO, and those stats only account for the cases that are reported. Inevitably, thousands of Afghans have died where they fell when the weapon they touched or stepped on detonated miles away from mine-clearance teams and the most basic medical assistance.
And despite incredible community mine-education efforts, some of which are funded in part by Oxfam, it is impossible to prevent all of these deaths. That is especially tough now, given the introduction of new ordnance that civilians are just being taught to identify, such as the technologically complex and highly lethal cluster bombs that were dropped by US and Coalition planes in 2001 and 2002. Many cluster weapons do not look at all like bombs, but instead resemble smashed DVD players—piles of colored wire and circuit boards that are deceptively ordinary. That is, until their unitary fuses are compromised, making every part of the device a trigger that will unleash enough C-4 plastic explosive to detonate a house when tripped.
Look around the streets of Kabul and you will quickly see how startlingly commonplace amputees are in this country. It is not rare to see men peddling makeshift tricycles with their hands down any busy thoroughfare in the city. The vast majority of Afghans lack the ability to receive even the most basic health care like antibiotics and sterile dressings, and professional-grade prosthetics and other types of devices and surgeries used to assist those missing limbs in the West are way beyond their means.
This dearth of medical services has spawned a whole range of homemade legs and arms fashioned from wood and scrap metal that often cause further orthopedic damage by not being properly fitted or resized as the person ages. Kids, who are still growing, need to have their artificial limbs replaced every year.
Some NGOs, including Handicap International, are providing cheap and effective artificial limbs through programs that teach people to make "Punjab legs"—rubber-cast apparatuses that cost little to make and can be mass-produced. Much more needs to be done, however, to help landmine survivors lead healthy and productive lives as a welcomed and appreciated part of Afghan society.
But the toll UXO and landmines take on Afghans is more than what is scrawled in bloody relief on their bodies. Such weapons take away scarce arable land that could be providing Afghans with livelihoods that could bring whole communities out of poverty.
Grazing animals, growing food, and producing cash crops such as cotton for textiles and grapes for raisins are complicated by several factors in addition to mines and UXO. Drought, warlords, water scarcity, and opium have also denied Afghans the ability to cultivate and use the natural resources around them to the extent that they could, but these weapons must be removed before these other dynamics can be fully addressed. UXO and mines also prevent the free movement of goods, services, and people to remote areas cut off from the rest of the country, retarding development in these areas by decades, in some cases.
Depressed yet?
Wait. There's hope. And hope has a tail and barks.
Today I visited my personal Graceland, the UN Mine Dog Center in Kabul, home to the UN's elite Mine Dog Group.
When I worked as a staff member of the US Campaign to Ban Landmines, part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, I heard story after story of the expertise, competence and courage of the mine dogs of Afghanistan. These puppies give Lassie a run for her money any day of the week. Yes, she could get Timmy out of a mineshaft-—these dogs, however, can get Timmy out of a minefield. Able to detect mines four times faster than humans, and able (unlike metal detectors) to find explosives encased in plastic, these German Shepherds and Labradors save thousands of Afghans each year from being blinded, maimed, dismembered, or killed.
First pioneered in Europe during the 1970's, dog detection units are an integral part of the race against time to make Afghanistan safe for its millions of inhabitants trying to rebuild their homes and villages from the ravages of seemingly unending conflict. It is poignant to me that the cruelty inflicted by human-made weapons such as the landmine, a weapon designed to maim and blind rather than kill, is interdicted day after day by the most benevolent form of animal intelligence you could hope to encounter. As the Japanese writer Kenzburo Oe put it when talking about another human-made horror, the atomic bomb, these dogs, in my opinion, help to "teach us to outgrow our madness."
Kenny and I pulled up to the gate of the Mine Dog Center just after the weekly exhibition put on by the dog teams for the public had finished. As we walked down the dusty road to the cluster of buildings that make up the team's new headquarters outside Kabul, my heart leapt to hear the barking of hundreds of dogs echoing from the kennels down the hill from where we were. What would cause the neighbors to call the police back home sounded at that moment, at least to my ears, like Beethoven's 9th Symphony, "Ode to Joy."
Mumtaz, the center's director of operations, was kind enough to take time out of his busy day to sit down with Kenny and me. I felt as unstoppably giddy as I was attending my first Red Sox game as a kid at Fenway Park; I wanted to see everything. Mumtaz, who has been with the unit since its inception, has trained teams in Yemen in the center's pioneering methods to use dogs as the world's best detectors of explosives. They can locate explosives in difficult terrain such as irrigated farmland, rocky hillsides, and maze-like urban areas, even five meters underground.
I could put this accomplishment in more technical and sophisticated terms, but I think what these dogs do is just plain cool. The center's 218 dogs begin their journey towards becoming full-fledged mine dogs soon after they're born. Mumtaz tells us, the look of a proud father beaming across his face, that 30 new puppies had recently been born. I wished I had had cigars to pass out to the proud "parents" at the center—-instead, I just said, "Congratulations."
The first stage of training is socialization, after which the dogs enter their first rigorous program of preparation for mine detection. They begin by playing with balls as a way to learn obedience, retrieval, and a sense of direction. Then comes the tough stuff—further units focus on teaching dogs to always run in a straight line, training them to adhere to the deminer's use of "safe lanes." Eventually the dogs graduate to obstacle courses that teach them to navigate stairs or concrete pipes and leap over obstructions that would confound the average dog vying for the blue ribbon at Westminster with grace and ease.
Training, while critically important to the effectiveness and safety of the mine-dog teams, is only one part of the equation. Trust is also essential for the dogs to be able to work well with their handlers, and for their human counterparts to work well with them. When they start training, the dogs are paired with handlers who name and take care of them. The goal is for the handler and his dog to establish an almost sacred bond based on things we two-legged creatures should do more of to each other: praise and mutual appreciation, general kindness, and constant concern for whether one or the other needs to rest, drink water, or eat.
Before heading out to the training grounds to watch the teams go through their paces, I asked Mumtaz about whether the perception in Muslim countries that dogs are unclean animals prevented the dogs from being accepted by people in Afghanistan. Mumtaz corrected my misconception, saying that this idea that Muslims, in this case Afghans, hated dogs was patently false. He even cited scripture from the Koran about the Prophet Mohammed's respect for dogs, adding that Afghans commonly keep dogs as pets in rural areas.
I took some pictures of Mumtaz showing Kenny his display case of defused mines that sat in the corner of his office. Looking at these things I had studied in books and seminars for so long, I had to remind myself that they were are casualty machines rather than the unobtrusive plastic and metal disks and boxes of coiled fuses, nitrate explosive, and mercury switches that they appear to be.
An image of a photo I had seen once of a Cambodian child who hit an M2, American-made blast mine with his sandaled foot while playing near his house popped into my mind. He died at the clinic from his wounds soon after the picture was taken. At first glance he barely resembled a boy at all-he was so blackened and bloodied. This child was killed by a bomb planted beneath the ground during a war that started and ended before he was born.
Now back to the puppies….
One of the first stations we visited was the ball yard. An instructor tossed a racquetball on a concrete floor for two or three German Shepherd puppies while his students (and temporary students, me and Kenny) looked on attentively. The little guys, only months old, chased after the ball with pure abandon. Their "colleagues," other puppies still in their cages, watched jealously, waiting for their change to play, too.
Soon, however, those dogs would add more than balls to their repertoire of "retrievable" items. The PMN-2 and 3 series blast mines. Hand grenades. POMZ-1 through 3 series trip-wire mines. One day, the infamous butterfly mine, a Russian mine with "wings," dropped by the millions from helicopters during the Soviet occupation in the 80s, will become as familiar to these dogs as a Frisbee is to your local Bowser or Ginger down at the park.
We also watched how young handlers reward their dogs-these were much older than the puppies but still young. After the dogs completed their task, the handlers would make chirping noises, almost like bird calls, and give them a good scratch. The dogs that are selected to become working dogs in the field are the best of the best, and they begin their careers at six months of age, like these dogs have. Mine dogs must work at least five years to conform to international standards, constantly being trained and retrained during that time to keep up both their sense of smell and their skills. Mumtaz said the best dogs keep working until their handlers know it's time for them to retire. One dog worked as 16 years.
At the obstacle course, we really got to see what these dogs could do. A young female took off like a shot, having received a signal from her trainer, navigating with ease a complicated course of barriers, stairs, and tubes. She stopped when told to do so, instinctively looking towards her handler to receive more specific instructions about whether to lie down or sniff. Moving like a fuzzy bullet train, the dog in question made it back to her handler for some words of praise, a scratch under the neck, and some time with her beloved ball.
After this demonstration, we saw several other demonstrations that included safe-lane training, where dogs walk in a line, and some other handling exercises. The most stunning one was actually seeing dogs deploy into a field where live mines, their fuses removed for safety, were hidden in situations similar to what they would find in a real detection and clearance scenario. We watched one dog find a PMN-2 pressure-sensitive blast mine hidden under rocks and soil, then sit down next to it until ordered to return back to the start of the safe lane. We then went out and dug the mine up and were invited to press our fingers on the trigger to see that it was real-which it was.
Kenny and I saw the vet clinic and pharmacy, a place Kenny said is the best-equipped pharmacy for man or beast in Afghanistan. I can believe it. Then it was almost time for the tour to end, but not before seeing the kennel itself. Anyone, whether a dog lover or not, would have been looking for a duffle bag to carry one of these new friends on the flight home. There they were, dozens of mine dogs in their UN-blue cages, panting, barking, scratching-doing what all dogs do, even "super" dogs like these.
I had a brief opportunity to visit with some of the puppies, a couple of which decided my finger made a good chew toy. I obliged by allowing my hand to be gnawed by these inquisitive pups.
How do you do justice to the risk and sacrifice these humans and canines suffer every day? You don't. There is nothing I can write that puts into words what these dog teams do. I can say, however, that I will always try to remember their faces, their commitment and courage, and yes, their dog breath. It was hard saying goodbye. But somehow Kenny pulled me back to the car, and as Omar, our driver, pulled away, I desperately wanted a copy of "Where the Red Fern Grows" to read on the ride home.
