Massacre in Mazar

The murdered U.N. workers are the latest trauma for a city that's seen centuries of horrific killings.

BY ANNA BADKHEN | APRIL 1, 2011

The death count from the sprawling United Nations compound in Mazar-e-Sharif trickled like an arsenic IV drip. Seven U.N. workers dead -- no, eight -- no, twelve. Some foreigners, some Afghans, all killed while trying to bring some stability to a nation crippled by a history of almost incessant violence. On Friday afternoon, a deranged rabble enflamed by vitriolic mullahs poured out of the Blue Mosque, mobbed the U.N. offices in the south of the city, toppled guard towers, set walls ablaze, and, beneath the alluvial slopes bloodred with wild spring poppies, proceeded to deliberately slaughter the people inside.

Who is to blame for these deaths?

The mob of knee-jerk, parochial fundamentalists in Mazar-e-Sharif, to whom anyone inside the U.N. compound -- like the 10 international relief workers slaughtered last August in Badakhshan province, or the Scottish aid worker kidnapped a month later in Kunar province and killed during a botched rescue attempt -- were not agents of reconstruction and aid but symbols of the infidel West, emissaries of the invading forces?

Or the mob of knee-jerk, parochial fundamentalists led by Pastor Terry Jones in Gainesville, Florida, some 7,449 miles away, whose callous and xenophobic burning of the Quran last week had enraged the Afghans?

Or the decade-long, excruciating standoff between two seemingly equally entrenched forces, NATO and the Taliban-led insurgency, that has convinced a nation envenomed with despair that violence is the ultimate and only solution to insult?

Underneath its fibrous connective tissue of tinsmith alleys, cerulean-tiled mosques, and rusty chipper vans, Mazar-e-Sharif festers with the memory of savageries inflicted upon it again and again and again. Friday's attack on an office that promotes governance and economic development in northern Afghanistan added a new wound. The Balkh provincial governor told the New York Times the mob fired on its victims with weapons wrested from U.N. guards, and, according to a U.N. spokesman, 24 people were injured. In today's Afghanistan, where some 30 million people eke out a hand-to-mouth existence with virtually no social protection, these injuries will condemn the victims and their families to a cycle of poverty and resentment that already garrotes the country.

***

I left Mazar-e-Sharif on Monday, March 28, after a four-week-long stay. It was my first trip to the city in almost a year, and a tense reunion. As new chunks of Afghanistan's north fell to the insurgency, this city, and most of Balkh province (of which Mazar is the capital), remained more or less free of violence. But apprehension hung over the city, gray and heavy like the pancake of smog that always looms above its flat roofs. A bomb detonated beneath an overpass near the airport a few days after my arrival; police told me several suicide bombers from southern Afghanistan were scouring the city for a convenient time and worthy targets to strike.

STR/AFP/Getty Images

 

Anna Badkhen is the author of Peace Meals and Waiting for the Taliban. She is working on a book about timelessness. She returned from Afghanistan this week. Her reporting there was made possible by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

MARTY MARTEL

5:39 PM ET

April 2, 2011

Afghanistan is paying for U. S. folly

The roots of the ‘current Afghan tragedy’ are in Washington where Bush administration decided to allow Musharraf to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz in November, 2001. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan (now relocated to Karachi by Pakistani ISI to protect them from possible US drone attacks) and Haqqani network (HQN) in North Waziristan from where Mullah Omar’s QST and Haqqani’s HQN have been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

Duplicitous Pakistan has poor U. S. over the barrel. US can NOT use its aid leverage to force Pakistan to stop supporting terrorist groups who kill US/NATO troops in Afghanistan day in and day out because US needs Pakistan’s help in ferrying supplies to those very US/NATO troops.

As Afghan President Karzai told a news conference in Kabul on 7/29/2010 after WikiLeaks leaks, “The time has come for our international allies to know that the war against terrorism is not in Afghanistan’s homes and villages. But rather this war is in the sanctuaries, funding centers and training places of terrorism which are in Pakistan. Our international allies have the ability to destroy these Pakistani sanctuaries, but the question is why they are not doing it?“

Even Afghanistan’s national security advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta has asked a similar question in a Washington Post article on 8/23/2010: “While we are losing dozens of men and women to terrorist attacks every day, the terrorists’ main mentor (Pakistan) continues to receive billions of dollars in aid and assistance. How is this fundamental contradiction justified? Despite facing a growing domestic terror threat, Pakistan “continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and Al Qaeda. Dismantling the terrorist infrastructure “requires confronting the state of Pakistan that still sees terrorism as a strategic asset and foreign policy tool”.

But Obama administration has already started back channel negotiations with Afghan Taliban leadership safely ensconced in Pakistan. Pakistan will assure the success of such talks to hasten US departure similar to North Vietnam’s peace talks with Henry Kissinger in 1973. That façade of peace will crumble once US leaves and Pakistan will bring back Taliban rule just as Communists took over in Vietnam.

US has decided to sacrifice Afghanistan at the altar called Pakistan.

 

CEOUNICOM

12:44 PM ET

April 4, 2011

""Who is to blame for these deaths?""

Comparing murdering mobs that burn and slaughter unarmed people with a couple of publicity-seeking fundies who burn an inanimate object is ridiculous.

If 'violence is a solution to insult' one has to ask why Afghans, or mazari afghans in particular, are subject to greater insult than say Turks, Saudis, Kashmiris, Indonesians, or people in Dearborne MI.

No one is to blame I suppose. Perhaps the UN is to blame for their unwanted, suspicious altruism. Perhaps the US is to blame for conceiving of the occupation in the first place. Perhaps the taliban are to blame for hosting al qaeda and waging war on the west. Who knows. Either way, some dumb fucking idiots murdered a bunch of unarmed, ostensible 'aid' workers. My only thought is that if I were working in that part of the world, among people that act like this, even if dispensing aid and doing development work? ....

Id be packing a gun. More likely 2.

Humanitarians need to be better armed.

 

LASTINGYOUNG

11:49 PM ET

April 25, 2011

Wow horror

This is a very sad situation, I saw a Videos cristianos about this mazacre. I don't like the war. I pray for the peace of the world.

 

LASTINGYOUNG

11:55 PM ET

April 25, 2011

resume the battle

Remember what happened? Foreign Taliban troops -- Pakistanis, Chechens and Arabs mostly, are being held at the ancient Qaila Jangi fortress outside Mazar-i-Sharif. They had negotiated a surrender with Northern Alliance General Rashid Dostum, who says they’ll be allowed passage to Pakistan. Afghan Taliban troops have already be allowed to return to their home villages or have been integrated into Northern Alliance units. A skirmish erupts inside the fortress walls. Why, is unclear. The official story, to be developed later into the bizarre pseudo-dichotomy that "this wasn’t a massacre, it was a battle" (it was both) is that some Taliban have smuggled arms into the prison. The story stinks. Why would fighters lay down their arms, allow themselves to herded into a fortress, surrounded on all sides by Northern Alliance troops and US and British special forces, and then, when they’re at their weakest and most vulnerable, without weapons expect those they can scrounge, dozens of them with their hands bound behind their backs, resume the battle?

 

LASTINGYOUNG

11:55 PM ET

April 25, 2011

resume the battle

Remember what happened? Foreign Taliban troops -- Pakistanis, Chechens and Arabs mostly, are being held at the ancient Qaila Jangi fortress outside Mazar-i-Sharif. They had negotiated a surrender with Northern Alliance General Rashid Dostum, who says they’ll be allowed passage to Pakistan. Afghan Taliban troops have already be allowed to return to their home villages or have been integrated into Northern Alliance units. A skirmish erupts inside the fortress walls. Why, is unclear. The official story, to be developed later into the bizarre pseudo-dichotomy that "this wasn’t a massacre, it was a battle" (it was both) is that some Taliban have smuggled arms into the prison. The story stinks. Why would fighters lay down their arms, allow themselves to herded into a fortress, surrounded on all sides by Northern Alliance troops and US and British special forces, and then, when they’re at their weakest and most vulnerable, without weapons expect those they can scrounge, dozens of them with their hands bound behind their backs, resume the battle?