On the Move

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On the street where Barasna lives in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, her Taliban neighbors all drive new Toyota Hi-Lux pickups and Land Cruisers, flashy symbols of their new power. But one night three weeks ago, Barasna heard the slamming of car doors and the crying of sleepy children. She peered out into the lane with its high mud walls and saw that every Taliban commander in the area was fleeing the city with his family. Barasna knew why. It was Sept. 11, and on the radio she and her doctor husband had heard about the suicide hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now the Taliban warriors were afraid that an enraged U.S. would immediately strike back.

In a matter of hours, Kandahar had become one of the most dangerous places on earth: both the Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and suspected Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden have houses there. "What are you waiting for?" a neighbor yelled at Barasna. "It's suicide to stay here." A turbaned Taliban commander in a Land Cruiser roared by, kicking up dust, heading for the moonlit road across the desert to Pakistan. "Look at the Taliban run," the neighbor shouted before running inside to pack his belongings. Later that night, Barasna, an energetic woman in her early 30s, donned her head-to-toe burka veil, padlocked her house and headed into the night with her husband, five children and the few provisions they could carry. "I was near the bus stop when I realized that I'd left water boiling on the fire for tea," Barasna says. "It all happened so fast."

By acting swiftly, Barasna and her family made it across the border to Pakistan. They were among the lucky ones. A few days later, Islamabad sealed off the frontier crossings, to block any new wave of refugees trying to get in before an expected U.S. attack against terrorist targets. At the Chaman frontier post southeast of Kandahar, and at Torkham, about 600 km north in the Khyber Pass, there were scenes of panic. When Afghans started crawling through the barbed-wire fencing, the Pakistani police attacked with whips and clubs, herding frightened families back across the border like dumb cattle. Some enraged Afghans responded with a barrage of stones. Others headed toward the old smugglers' routes through the mountains. Some may succeed in slipping past the Pakistani border police, but they must tread carefully: the trails are peppered with thousands of land mines left over from the Soviet war.

Pakistan's unneighborliness isn't surprising. It already hosts more than 2 million Afghans, harboring more refugees than any other country in the world. And aid workers fear that, if the U.S. strikes, as many as 1 million more Afghans may attempt to cross the jagged 1,600-km border into Pakistan. An additional 500,000 refugees are likely to flood into Iran; a similar number could pour into the Central Asian republics. The certain result: a devastating humanitarian crisis. "We're afraid that most of Afghanistan could empty out into the neighboring countries," says a relief official in Islamabad.

Despite the risks, aid organizations expect Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf to respond compassionately by opening the border gates—but only after any U.S. attacks begin. Once that happens, the Afghans will be allowed to stay in spartan camps just inside the frontier. Providing for them will be a formidable challenge. Already, officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are scouting out locations within the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. Pakistan's government estimates a need for about 100 new camps, each able to shelter 10,000 people. "Water is scarce," says UNHCR's spokesman Rupert Colville in Quetta, "There has been a drought for three years." Relief officials say as many as 10,000 Afghans may have already slipped into Pakistan in recent days and are being sheltered by fellow clansmen, invisible inside the fortress-like tribal homes of the harsh borderlands.

Western nations are eager to open their war chests to fight international terrorism, but the test of how willing they are to help the inevitable victims from the fallout of this battle is just beginning. After years of donor neglect of Afghanistan—caused, in part, by the Taliban's oppressive treatment of women—the UNHCR has launched an appeal for nearly $600 million in emergency refugee aid. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is chipping in $40 million for the Afghans and an additional $17.6 million for Pakistanis living in the impoverished border region. Germany quickly followed suit with a pledge of $7 million, and the U.S. has promised 240,000 tons of food aid.

Few Afghans are willing to wait until the bombs fall before they dash to safety. The border crossing at Chaman, for one, could hardly be in a more inhospitable place. On one side lies Afghanistan, where the hazy, distant hills gleam strangely, as if the earth were glazed by the heat from Pakistan's 1998 nuclear test on its side of the border. There are only a scattering of thorny shrubs on the landscape. A few Pakistani frontier guards use stubby whips to hold back a tide of gaudily painted trucks, donkey carts loaded with gnarled metal scraps (about all that remains of value in Afghanistan) and a multitude of pushing, elbowing and complaining Afghans. Inside the Pakistani border post, an official sits in the corner of his office shouting into an ancient telephone. His desk is as far as possible from the windows, shattered by angry, stone-hurling Afghans.

There is a sudden commotion. A wizened Afghan in rags has stopped pulling his cart and is banging his head on the ground so hard that it has begun to bleed. "Allah, I surrender!" he wails, "If you don't let me pass, I'll earn no money. I'd rather die than go back empty-handed to my starving children." The display of self-mortification works; the Pakistanis gently dust off the bleeding old man and let him through, which provokes a wave of fierce clamoring and shoving among the other Afghans crowding the border. They are all just as hungry, just as frantic.

Back on the outskirts of Kandahar, the Taliban is stopping families at gunpoint and turning them back from the road to Pakistan. Muammer Zahir, a twentysomething truck driver, was able to dodge the checkpoint. "What will the Americans attack?" he asks. "Our houses are already destroyed by years of fighting." U.N. officials say the Taliban is still letting some women and children head toward the frontier—but only after the men traveling in the party are forcibly conscripted. Relief officials have coined a new word to describe these poor Afghans: the "internally stuck." And nobody wants to be stuck in a raging war.