ISLAMABAD -- A bus driving along a quiet road in central Afghanistan earlier this month suddenly drove over the country's worst killer. A loud explosion could be heard across the surrounding neighborhoods as the bus was ripped apart, leaving 13 people dead and another six badly injured.
The cause of the tragedy, once again, was just one of the estimated 10 million land mines planted across the war-ravaged country. Land mines already have left several thousand people dead, injured or maimed. Agencies have spent millions of dollars to detect and clear them, but amid a very poor profile of their scattered locations, the problem lingers.
Land mines are perhaps the most powerful reminder of the devastation caused to the country's body fabric, first during the invasion by the former Soviet Union and subsequently by the infighting between competing warlords. Now Afghanistan is at the center of an international hunt for terrorists following last September's attacks in the United States. Its future is as much at risk from the activism of militant groups as from economic uncertainty.