When the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan, it left Afghani roads, villages and fields sown with tens of thousands of land mines. According to the international Landmine Monitor Report for 2006,

 
“Afghanistan emerged from more than two decades of conflict, starting in the 1970s, as one of the countries most contaminated by landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW). Security forces have continued to discover huge quantities of abandoned explosive ordnance (AXO) and unexploded ordnance (UXO).[28] The Landmine Impact Survey, which completed fieldwork in January 2005, reported 2,245 casualties in the two years before the survey, including 922 people killed and 1,323 injured. It also found 2,368 communities and more than four million people affected by mines and identified some 715 square kilometers of hazardous areas.[29]      

Most of the landmines in Afghanistan were laid in the decade-long war of resistance that followed the Soviet occupation in 1979, but significant contamination also occurred during the civil war (1992-1996) and during the Taliban regime (1996-2001). The US-led coalition’s intervention in late 2001 added considerable quantities of UXO to the problem, including large quantities of cluster munitions, and this was followed by further landmine use by non-coalition forces.[30]   

Landmines were used by Soviet occupation forces both for conventional military purposes, as defensive barriers around military installations and to protect communications, and as part of a strategy to depopulate villages, placing mines in houses, irrigation systems and agricultural and grazing land. Mines were also scattered from helicopters and other aircraft; huge quantities of UXO remained in areas of conflict. Afghan guerrilla forces also used mines to block roads and harass movement of enemy forces.[31] More mines were laid during the civil war by the Northern Alliance.”

 
The incomplete but interesting movie Charlie Wilson’s War contains a fragmentary reminder of that vindictive and bloody action during the Soviet invasion. Only fragmentary: the movie shows the Soviets using land mines while in Afghanistan, targeting children in particular as a means to depopulate whole areas of the country, but does not include the historical fact that the U.S. administration also supplied anti-personnel landmines to the Afghan resistance fighters, the mujahideen.

 
That land mines are good only for gratuitous and wanton carnage among the world’s most helpless populations has been known for years. The lesson has yet to be applied with the international cooperation one would wish, although there has been progress around the globe. When Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2006, it left hundreds of thousands of landmines and cluster munitions in Lebanon. It has since provided maps of the locations of mine fields and landmine stockpiles, amounting to 400,000 landmines in all, to the Lebanese.

 
According to Landmine Monitor, 155 nations have either signed or acceded to the Mine Ban Treaty. Only two nations are confirmed to have planted landmines in the past year: Russia, largely against the Chechnyans, and Myanmar/Burma.
 

With all the progress made around the world by nations, groups and individuals, much work remains to be done. There are obvious risks. There are always setbacks. But the payoff for de-mining is incalculable. Fields are reclaimed for people to raise their herds and to grow their food crops. Rivers and streams are more safely accessible. Land becomes available, or at least usable, for road and railroad construction as well as for living and for doing business on.
 

When it comes to abolishing landmines, the picture is all pluses, no minuses. This is not a pro-con argument, because there is no con.

 
It remains only to hope that 2008 will continue the progress made in 2007, expand the accurate collection of data on landmines, expand the areas of land de-mined and reclaimed, reverse the setbacks, and continue to widen the segments of the world’s population informed about this human scourge that reached demonic proportions.