EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON AFGHANISTAN
The civilian population
The effects of the war on the civilian population were horrendous.
While certain areas were insulated for most of the 1980s from the
worst effects – notably Kabul, with its security belts – the rural
areas in which the bulk of the population lived were acutely vul-
nerable to the kinds of weapons which the Soviet and Afghan
Armies employed. A careful analysis of data collected in refugee
camps relating to patterns of war- related mortality concluded that
between 1978 and 1987, unnatural deaths in Afghanistan amounted
to 876,825 (Khalidi, 1991: 107). On average, this represented over
240 deaths every day for ten years straight, or over 60 Afghan
deaths for each Soviet soldier who died as a result of the war. In
assessing the social effects of the war, however, it is necessary also
to take into account the position of the injured and the disabled. In
1995, the World Health Organisation estimated the physically dis-
abled as totalling ‘nearly 1.5 million persons’ (WHO, 1995: 1), and
in a society as damaged as Afghanistan, providing even minimal
support for the disabled is an awesome task (Miles, 1990).
Furthermore, the scale of war-related psychological trauma could
not but have been massive, although such trauma is easily over-
looked, not only because of a dearth of vocabulary in Afghan lan-
guages pointing to depression (Waziri, 1973: 214), but also because
of social pressure on the victims of trauma to hide their suffering.
To this must be added the effects of displacement. As noted earl-
ier, at the beginning of the 1990s over 6 million Afghan refugees
were outside the country. While Pakistan and Iran performed
remarkably in hosting the vast majority of these people, the envir-
onment of the refugees was inevitably one in which skills acquired
through daily exposure to economic activity in Afghanistan were
lost. Thus, the refugee exodus was destructive not only of the psy-
chosocial wellness of those driven into exile, but also of the abili-
ty of a new generation of Afghans to function as farmers,
herdsmen, or traders. Such disruption to human capital formation
154 The Afghanistan Wars