Abdul Kade has the soft cheeks of any normal toddler, but when his mother peels off his trousers and lifts his sweater we see a shockingly different person. His legs are matchsticks, his buttocks hang limp and his tummy is swollen by severe malnutrition.
The image is out of Africa, so it seems fitting that the two nurse nutritionists looking after Abdul and the other tiny Afghans in a feeding centre run by the charity World
Vision should be Africans.
?Afghan children have round moon-faces so it’s not like Africa where sunken eyes and cheeks give starvation away immediately,” says Jennifer Kisingula from Kenya, who has been in this remote corner of western Afghanistan since January.
She and her colleagues visited several villages around Qala-i-Nau, the main town in Badghis province, peering at random into mud-brick houses to try to gauge the scale of the catastrophe. They found that three summers of drought had brought some people, literally, to their knees.
?In Kockchahel we discovered adults who cannot stand up. They are lying in their houses, too weak to move. Some said they have had no food for seven days,” Kisingula says. ?In this feeding centre we are looking after 10 children under five, but we found at least a hundred others who ought to be here.”
The remoteness of Afghanistan’s mountain valleys means many people with dying children fail to make the journey to the feeding centre, which is attached to the local hospital, a sad building where drugs are as scarce as laughter. Such severe hunger has never struck the region before.
In Kondolan, the first in a string of settlements 90 minutes’ walk up the valley from Qala-i-Nau, villagers take us round a new cemetery. They started burials there four months ago. We count 112 graves covered in squares of turf or, more commonly, piles of neat round stones.
Kondolan’s remaining population numbers 250, says Mirza Behbut, a 21-year-old farmer. That means a death rate of around 30%. ?My mother died. My sister died. So did the wife of my brother,” he says.
Astonishingly, it is to this wasteland of human misery that the big international aid agencies are urging people to return. Every day a convoy of lorries sets out from the huge camp for displaced people at Maslakh near Herat, the largest city in western Afghanistan. For two years the camp has been home to tens of thousands of hungry Afghans who fled there when drought first struck.
Now, supplied with free transport and handouts of flour, seeds and fertiliser, people sit on the backs of swaying vehicles as they lumber up the snow-covered pass and down an iron-red canyon to Badghis. Villagers are also tempted by reports of rain, which has made the hillsides sprout for the first time since 1998.
The scene is tantalisingly deceptive. The sheep that should be munching the new grass were eaten or sold for slaughter long ago. The only tangible benefit from the rain has been a resurgence of wild spinach.
The foreign-funded programme for returning thousands of displaced Afghans has split the international aid community. Most non-governmental charities oppose the big agencies such as the World Food Programme and the International Organisation for Migration, which are helping to run it. They accuse them of giving in to pressure from Western donor governments and the interim administration of Hamid Karzai in Kabul.
?The return issue is a disaster,” says Duccio Staderini of MÃ