He belonged to one of the remote villages of north where life is still as slow as it was many centuries before. Houses are still made of mud, roads are unpaved, water is brought from well and they have just heard about the civic facilities of electricity and gas but they have not seen them. People still work in their fields and lead the simplest lives. It was all OK until some of the rich landlords of the village went to the cities and brought with them car, latest clothes, and other similar things and introduced them to the villagers. There are also present a number of shops in the village where edibles and other industry-made objects give the proof of modernity. Until the villagers were inflicted with the virus of uncontrolled wishes and desires, they lead a happy and contented life in their limited resources but new generation was not as simple as their forefathers. They had more knowledge of modern things and mode of living and were greedier to acquire them. The condition was worsened by three decades of war and draught of recent years. Fields and farms dried up and farmers of the village had to turn to other professions to ear the bread for their families. In such circumstances of deprivation and despair, a generation was brought up which was frustrated, greedy and helpless. Then many of them moved to the cities but they were not educated to get their desirable jobs so they became guards, cleaners and acquired similar jobs. But these opportunities were also limited and they also got dried up. Many of them tried to go abroad for work but it was very dangerous and in some cases, absolutely fruitless.

After the establishment of democratic government, thousands of jobless people joined police, national army, foreign-based construction and security companies, and also as interpreters with foreign troops or their contractors. These jobs offered good salaries and all those, who joined them, were happy to be able to earn the bread for their families but the problem did not end here. Taliban announced that people working with foreign troops or companies will be regarded their accomplices and will be treated similarly. The years stretching from 2005 to 2007 were the worst in a sense that hundreds of people working with foreign troops or companies were slaughtered on different highways of the country. In this regard, most dangerous was the busy Kabul-Kandahar highway where Taliban used to stop the vehicles and boarded down their targeted people and shot or slaughtered them on the spot. Later on, such incidents greatly decreased but of course, we cannot claim that they have finished.

A few days before last Eid, five men were travelling from Kandahar to Kabul that they were stopped somewhere near Ghazni and were slaughtered. Another such horrible incident happened a few days after Eid. These were the poor workers of North who worked in a construction company in an airfield built in Helmand province. They were not engineers, or construction experts or handsomely paid employees rather they were mere laborers who worked from morning till evening with mud, bricks and cement and earned their living after all the labor and hard work. In majority of the cases, the victims were either laborers, guards, cook or of similar positions.

A few days earlier, one of our relatives returned from the sensitive area Sangin of Helmand province. He worked as a guard in one of the military posts controlled by American forces. He worked there for 18 months without once returning to his house and family because the way was more dangerous than the work itself. After 18 months, he decided to leave to his house and was brought to Kandahar by a special armored vehicle. From Kandahar, he had to take either a flight to Kabul or go by road which was full dangers. But his salary was also not so high that he could have taken a flight and he decided to go home by road. The journey started early in the morning and until he did not reach to Kabul in afternoon; he was in intense trauma of fear and death. It was lucky for him that he did not confront anyone on the way and reached Kabul safe and sound. Later at night, when were having dinner together, I asked if he would like to return to his job and he gave faint smile and said, ‘No, I will never forget the fear that I felt on the way and this fear will never let me to go back to my job.’ My next question was, ‘Then what are you going to do for a living?’ He again gave a faint smile and said, ‘I don’t know, let’s wait and watch.’ He told me that there were hundreds of guards and other workers from his and adjacent villages and they worked there because they had failed to find any work in the village and they did this as a final option.

In Kabul, you might have noticed that number of burger and chips sellers is increasing day by day and this fact shows two realities; one is that people with limited income are increasing who buy these cost-efficient burgers and chips and secondly, numbers of jobless people have reached to a horrible scale and they want to earn their living, however it is possible. Continuing unrest has destroyed all the industries and new industries are not established. Draught, expensive pesticides and seeds, lack of energy and transportation and other similar problems have made agriculture a struggling branch of economy and in such circumstances, people are suffering a lot to earn their livings. Some months ago, I saw a video on Youtube in which an angry person addresses angrily a crowd, ‘These Americans and their foreign allies have ruined our country. I have seen with my eyes that 700 young Afghan girls are working with them in their offices and this condition is a point of shame for all of us. We should immediately do something to expel them out of our country.’ While watching the video, I thought for a while, ‘If these girls are working with them, they are not doing it for fun. Their husbands, brothers and fathers have been killed and insecurity has not left behind any industry and they are compelled to come out of their houses to earn the bread for their old and dying parents and young and weak siblings.’

Many Afghans also say, ‘We also know that we should not work with foreigners but when some people are destroying the shops, bridges, roads and factories and making us jobless and they are also not doing anything to provide us with a job, we are left with no option except to do this job because we have to arrange bread for our children’.

The above killing of Afghans is just like killing the workers of a factory and not doing anything against the factory owner. If some people don’t like foreigners, they should try their best to attack them but it is meaningless to attack their poor Afghan servants or workers. When an Afghan is killed, many more jobless people apply to fill this space.