here Four years ago Unicef commissioned a report on the psychological effects of the war on children in Kabul. It is an unemotional document, written in the dry language of a psychological survey, but its findings are almost unbearably painful. Three-quarters of the children interviewed had lost a member of their family in the fighting in the previous four years; one-third had seen a family member die. Two-thirds had watched someone being killed by rockets; half had seen death by bombs, gunfire and landmines. Two-thirds had seen dead bodies or body parts; the same proportion had heard people screaming for help, and seen their own house being shelled or rocketed. The long-term effects of such exposure, under the term post-traumatic stress disorder, are hard to predict, even in a country with sophisticated psychiatric care. In present-day Afghanistan, they are unfathomable. There are still more heartbreaking and chilling statistics in the Unicef survey. Nine out of 10 of the children questioned had believed that they would be killed during the fighting. Almost the same proportion sometimes or often thought life was not worth living.
