There are so many landmines in Afghanistan, the country is literally about to blow. But removing these mines is no easy task. An exclusive report from Kabul.
By Jeffrey Stern
A member of the United Nations mine-removal team in Afghanistan delicately holds the fuse from a soon-to-be detonated ERW.
KABUL, Afghanistan -- There is a landmine museum in Kabul. It�s a single poorly lit room with portraits on the wall of kids suddenly made asymmetrical by munitions left behind. Armies withdraw, but they don�t pick up after themselves.
Here, on display, are all the devilish devices men have dreamt up to disassemble one another. Claymores, rocket propelled grenades, rounds the size of your forearm. The cases are open, so you can reach in and pick the things up.
They have mines from America, China, Italy, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt; everyone seems to have buried relics somewhere in Afghanistan. The tags on the unearthed weapons are simple: �Russia; trip wire; operational pressure 250kgs; 1000 pieces chopped steel rod.� �Pakistan; claymore; electrical initiation; 600 6-millimeter steel ball bearings.� They�re less �improvised� than buried propane tanks wrapped in nails on roadsides, but the idea is the same.
And just like IED�s, they�re assigned sterile-sounding acronyms. The agencies deal in ERW�s and UXO�s -- Explosive Remnants of War and Unexploded Ordinance, respectively -- so they might talk courteously about these things that keep refugees from repatriating, rob families of their breadwinner, and don�t know an advancing soldier from a child fetching water, so that the kid giving you the thumbs-up when your armored SUV rumbles by will one day take a wrong step and be ripped apart by a six hundred steel ball bearings. Something like that happens twice a day in Afghanistan.
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