Kandahar

Tonight Jen and I went to Haleh's house and watched the movie "Kandahar" about an Afghani woman who lives in Canada but is going back to Afghanistan to find her sister. The movie was short, 85 minutes, but powerful. I don't know how true the movie was, that is, how well it portrayed life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Some of the scenes depicted were unbelievable, like one of the first scenes where a woman is teaching young girls who are about to enter Afghanistan about how to avoid landmines. She warns the children not pick up a doll on the ground if they see one, for there is a mine under it.

Sometimes I find it hard to imagine a more stupid creation by humans than landmines. Its not like landmines are smart enough to know when to blow up. They kill anything and everything. And its not like they are easy to remove either, who would want that job? Another disturbing scene in the movie shows a bunch of limbless men describing how they lost their limbs to landmines and then fight over prosthetic replacements. And it makes me even more angry to think that the US still uses cluster bombs. They do the same thing. The bomb breaks apart into a bunch of little bombs, many of which do not explode until some kid sees it and picks it up. These were used a lot in Afghanistan and I even heard they are yellow, the same color as the food packets that were dropped over Afghanistan. When I was in Israel we drove through mine fields in the Golan near the border of Syria. There are acres and acres of land that is now completely untouched and hazardous. How's that for environmental preservation?