How Afghanistan's Deadly Deep Freeze Means Trouble After Things Thaw

The mud-walled hut in which four-month-old Khair Mohammad froze to death was covered by an emergency-aid tarp sagging under the weight of the snow. Throughout the camp in Kabul, similar dwellings were blanketed in white. The snow fell in heavy, wet flakes and stuck to the bare heads and thin shoulders of the camp's children — many wearing only shirts and rubber flip-flops. The kids were running to collect blankets and clothes that had been haphazardly dropped off by a disorganized jumble of foreign aid agencies, Afghan NGOs and businessmen and sympathetic foreigners reacting to the news that about two dozen children had frozen to death in the past month in the makeshift camps housing the thousands of people displaced by Afghanistan's war.

"Maybe tonight everything will be O.K., or maybe more children will die. It's the same thing day in, day out," says Sayed Mohammad, Khair's father, struggling with nearly frozen hands to secure a tent rope to a stake outside his dirt-floored house. "Sometimes we have food. Sometimes there is no food. Sometimes we don't have any heat. Sometimes it's snowing. We have no control. If we have one thing, then we don't have another," Sayed tells TIME. "We have no choice. Some days we have no dinner, and we just sit and look at each other's faces," he says. (See pictures of the deadly cold gripping Europe.)

"When it snows, I get tears in my eyes thinking about how many more dead there will be," says Julie Bara, a water, sanitation and hygiene program coordinator for Solidarités International, a French group that has been working at the camps in Kabul. "The future for these children is the most uncertain."

Khair died late last week, making him the 17th child to freeze to death in the Nasaji Bagrami internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in just 30 days. Though numbers remain vague because of deaths left unrecorded by families and officials, Kargar Nuragli, spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Health, tells TIME that at least 24 children have died from the unusual cold snap and the heavy snow that has blanketed Kabul in the past month. But Khair's death is only the latest tragedy to befall Sayed Mohammad's family. "We moved to this camp because of the war. Two of my children died in Helmand province, and my father and brother were killed there. We had to. We didn't come here out of luxury," Sayed tells TIME.

Indeed, Kabul is a fragile bubble of safety and relative economic prosperity — along with other large Afghan cities like Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar — compared with the impoverished countryside ravaged by a decade-long war. The only alternative would be camps in neighboring Pakistan or Iran — and the limbo of refugee existence. The plight of these Afghans will not get better when it gets warmer; there are other, larger problems that the issues in the camps merely highlight. (Is climate change to blame for Europe's deep freeze?)

Over 10-plus years of war, the big cities have seen their IDP populations and returnee refugees ebb and flow with the violence in the surrounding countryside. The numbers tell the story. Even as the fighting in southern Afghanistan stabilized, the IDP and refugee populations in Kabul increased about 5% in 2009, about 10% in 2010 and more than 23% in 2011. "The IDP population has been increasing exponentially since 2009. Just looking at the math, there could be a greater than 35% increase for 2012, taking the population to around 40,000," says an aid worker who declined to be identified because of the delicacy of the politics involved. Right now there are 43 "informal settlements" around Kabul, totaling 20,000 to 30,000 people, according to two different censuses. And there are an additional 5,000 around the city limits.

And though recent media coverage of the wave of deaths of children under age 5 has spurred an increase in the amount of aid — organized or not — the government does not seem to have a solid, long-term plan to take care of the poorest of the poor. What's more, the Afghan government fears that the availability of aid will only draw a wave of impoverished farmers to the relative safety of Kabul — a fear based on the experience of other humanitarian crises around the world. "The government is afraid," Mohammad Diam Kakar, director general of the Disaster Assistance Agency, tells TIME. "Abdul Karim Khalili, Second Vice President and director of the National Disaster Management Committee, said at a meeting a few days ago that if we cannot find a solution and the IDPs will not go home, then, with the help they have received recently — which has been broadcast all over the world by the media — maybe we will receive more IDPs." (See Afghanistan's struggles with maternal mortality.)

A spokesman for the Ministry of Refugees says that with international support, the government will provide people with land in any province and a two-room house. Where the money and land will come from — a sorely contested issue in a country with few documented land titles — is unclear. But the people at the camps know the score if they leave the bubbles of security and relative abundance of social services. "I went to the camps yesterday, and they said they don't want to leave Kabul for any place," says Kakar. "They told me, 'We will not receive the support we are getting now from the government, the NGOs and the President if we go home. We will stay here.' "

The support the people are getting is not enough. "The future of these children will not be any different from how we live now. There are no schools. There are no clinics. They will be illiterate. They will be uneducated. They will have the same condition as us," says Wali Khan, an elder from Helmand who moved to the camp three years ago. Observers agree that such a situation creates an opportunity for radical elements to gain a foothold in an already aggrieved population — the exact situation that led to the rise of the Taliban in the first place.

For their part, the Taliban made the point in a Twitter post that the recent deaths are "a sample of things which happen in areas ruled by ISAF [the International Security Assistance Force]." A spokesman for the group, Zabiullah Mujahed, says that "if we come back into the power, we will definitely have systems and programs to take care of people in any season" and adds, "We will take care of the needs of people very honestly without cheating or lying. We will not do as the current government is doing." But again, without an infrastructure to collect taxes, the claims of both the government and the Taliban seem flimsy. (See how surgery may affect children's behavior.)

Back at the camp's whitewashed mud walled mosque, a group of men huddled inside, their breath fogging the air. Most were visibly shivering. The Pashtuns are incredibly hospitable to guests; they apologized repeatedly for not offering a seat and a cup of tea, as the floor was covered only in a thin plastic prayer mat and there was no tea and no wood to make a fire. Shivering children stared through the door.

Standing amid shawls and turbans flecked in snow, the men told story after story of heartbreak, sorrow and death. Finally, a camp leader, Wakhil Mohammad Ibrahim, had had enough of the talk and issued a frustrated ultimatum to Afghan President Hamid Karzai — a challenge that illuminates the precarious knife edge Afghanistan straddles just a few years before an international military withdrawal, one that could be accompanied by an exodus of aid agencies. "Under the Taliban, we always got help. But now, we are here in Kabul, and we are getting aid, and we are getting help from a lot of countries, and this son of a bitch Karzai doesn't even care about us," Ibrahim said. The expletive was startling. The Pashtun use insults only when they are extremely agitated. "This is my message. This is my warning to Karzai: If you recognize us as Afghans, give us any job. We will do anything for our country. Just provide us with the same condition the Taliban did when we were in Kandahar. If not, this country is yours. We will go to Pakistan, we will go to Iran, and we will forget you."

See pictures of the U.S. embassy that was attacked in Kabul.

See China's deep freeze.