HERAT: The steel carnage of war lay before Sean Moorhouse, the twisted metal and moonscape craters left by a US bombing run. Littering the scene were explosives of every lethal form — bombs, grenades, artillery shells, rockets — that were scattered when the Americans hit a Taliban munitions camp. “Don’t kick anything,” he advised.

For Moorhouse, 34, a bomb disposal expert working for the UN World Food Programme, the work has just begun. As the war in Afghanistan subsides, the job of cleaning up its explosive residue looms huge.

Afghanistan is littered with an estimated 10 million land mines, the product of 23 years of war. And that was before US planes dropped thousands of pounds of explosives in four months of bombardment after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The explosives included cluster bombs, each of which scatters 202 smaller bombs. When they hit, they are designed to rain incendiary fire and armour-piercing shrapnel over a wide area.

“Our problem is not the ones that worked,” said Moorhouse. “It’s the ones that didn’t.” Those now lie in wait, a daily danger to curious children, wandering shepherds and refugees who stumble across them.

Moorhouse said the problem is greater than the Pentagon acknowledges. The Pentagon contends the “failure” rate of cluster bombs — those that do not explode — is 5 percent to 7 percent. Moorhouse calculates the failure rate is 14 percent to 19 percent, leaving as many as 38 live “bomblets” on the ground from each dropped cluster bomb.

He also says some bombs missed their targets. Comparing the target coordinates provided by the US military with where the bombs fell shows “the accuracy of the US figures is pretty doubtful,” differing by as much as four miles, he said.

Bashir Ahmad, 25, lives in a crowded warren of mud-brick homes about a mile from a military camp on the outskirts of Herat, and almost as close to a second camp. He was on his roof, feeding his pet pigeons and chatting with his father and a neighbour, when a US plane passed overhead. The sky blossomed with mustard-coloured canisters floating from tiny parachutes, he said.

Suddenly, his neighbourhood was an inferno of shrapnel and fire. Pieces of the cluster bombs ripped through his back, arms, legs and side. As he stumbled from the high-walled homes, he saw the remains of the other two men.

“I know the Americans were aiming at the army camps,” said Ahmad, whose home was destroyed and who lost partial use of an arm. “What is the use of being angry?”

When the smoke cleared, the area was littered with dozens of the canisters. Nabi Bullah, 60, was eager to clear the debris. He picked up a dozen canisters and threw them into the muddy canal that runs through the neighbourhood. “I didn’t know what they were,” he said. He now knows he’s lucky to be alive.

“They are usually pretty sensitive,” Moorhouse said of the cluster bomb canisters, which are designed to send fragments through seven inches of steel. “They can go off if they are in the rubble and you just move a brick, or if you use a radio in the area.”

The cluster bombs and other unexploded ordnance have set back the painstaking efforts to remove the land mines that have been planted in Afghanistan since the 1979 Soviet invasion.

“I used to be able to send my teams” to outlying provinces to remove mines, said Haji Siddiqui, manager of the regional mine action committee, which has more than 200 disposal experts on the job. “Now we are too busy here in Herat. We can’t even get to the other areas.”

Mine removal started in 1989, but in western Afghanistan, only about one-fourth of the mined areas have been cleared. “At this rate, it will take us 30 to 35 years,” said Mulajan, an official of Afghanistan’s Mine Control Planning Agency.

The dangers are compounded by people moving around because of the war. “There are lots of refugees who are starting to come back,” said Mohammad Farhad, who is part of a programme to educate Afghans about the dangers. “They don’t know where the dangerous areas are.”

And there are new risks, Moorhouse said. His experts spent 14 days digging out an unexploded 2,000-pound bomb, one of the larger US weapons, that was buried near a residential area.

“If it had blown up, a lot of people would have been killed,” he said. They defused it and loaded it onto Moorhouse’s truck to take it to a remote area for detonation. “Strangely, there weren’t many volunteers to ride with me.”

The disposal experts usually disarm mines and larger bombs, but the cluster bombs are too sensitive, so they pack sandbags around them and detonate them. There have been no casualties among the teams working on disposal since the US-led war began, Moorhouse said. But “there’s a certain inevitability about casualties,” he said. “People get blase. They say, ‘I’ve done this a million times,’ and get careless.” —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.