CHAMAN, Pakistan, 5 December — The river of Afghan men, women and children who pour through Chaman’s border wire is a Cinemascope obscenity.

First, they need to state their reasons for entering Pakistan to a soldier sitting atop a concrete bunker. Then they have to produce documents at the border gate. Then they have to face the press.

The television cameras move like beetles through the mob of refugees, selecting a man who dares to speak, who saw a body hanging in the main square of Kandahar, a man who — in a second — becomes the center of an ever-growing amoeba of wires and lenses and notebooks and video cassettes.

“It was the body of an American soldier,” he says suddenly and the agency boys stop writing. Another man is cornered by television crews from Japan, France 2 and Catalan television. He doesn’t speak Japanese or French or Catalan — indeed, the “Catalan” reporter turns out to be a Basque — but the Pakistani translator bellows questions about the body in the Kandahar square. “He was a young man,” the Afghan replies warily. “He was tortured and killed before they hanged him up. He was a friend of Mulla Hakzar.”

The story becomes clearer. Mulla Hakzar was the Taleban interior minister in Kabul before he changed sides. His friend — the hanged man — was allegedly found with a GPS (global positioning systems) device, enough to condemn him as an American spy.

His fate, of course, is important to us. It is further proof of the ruthlessness of the Taleban, our enemy in the War for Civilization, of their cruelty and their despair. A truck driver who has lost two family members in American bombing attracts fewer cameras. Not a single photographer bothers with an old Afghan man I find resting in the broken metal chair of the chief immigration officer.

He is wearing an odd pair of shoes, the toes of the right shoe pointing to the sky. The reason is simple: only a wooden stump emerges from his right trouser leg. It somehow adheres to the shoe but upends it the moment the weight of his body is applied. The left shoe is flat on the ground. Above it stands a bright pink plastic leg with a wooden foot which fits the shoe, a hairless, feminine prosthesis. I try to talk to this sweating, bearded, legless man but he will not respond. He is gritting his teeth with pain but he could talk if he wanted to.

How did he lose his legs? His eyes move toward the dustbowl of Chaman with its packed, filthy, Dickensian streets and he stands up, swaying, and begins to stump off down the road between lines of barbed wire. The cameramen ignore him. They know he is the victim of another war, of landmines — there are 20 million in Afghanistan — laid by the Russians who are our new allies in the War for Civilization. He knows that too. He will not talk to me and, after a few moments, I realize he is right not to talk.

The crowds still gather on the other side of the wire. The Pishin Scouts allow photographers to snap pictures. We stand there, focusing on the tractor-load of children, the elderly man lying on sacks on a truck, the Afghan girl — perhaps five years old — who is begging from a soldier. But we cannot absorb the sheer mass of people. They came like this when the Russians invaded in 1979 but somehow they have become too familiar — banalizé as my friends from France 2 would say — in history. Vietnam 1972, Palestine 1948, Poland and Germany 1945, France 1940. The poor, dispossessed and the terrified are background material.

An old couple arrive in wheelbarrows. The man hunched in one, the woman — head lolling out of the bucket — in the one behind, each pushed by two grinning, laughing youths who shout to the journalists and cruelly point to their charges.

Had the couple been able to walk, we would have ignored them. But an elderly man and woman in wheelbarrows is too good a picture to miss.

Not so the white-haired man who stared at me with his left eye until I was forced to look at his right eye, a nightmare socket, a tissue of skin criss-crossed with tiny red scars. No photos of this Cyclops in rags.

From all over the countryside, there come stories of villages crushed by American bombs; an entire hamlet destroyed by B-52s at Kili Sarnad, 50 dead near Tora Bora, eight civilians killed in cars bombed by US jets on the road to Kandahar, another 46 in Lashkargah, 12 more in Bibi Mahru.

We are not supposed to know the details of these deaths. “Investigation?” the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, roared at a press conference last week, claiming he knew nothing of Amnesty International’s call for an inquiry into the Mazar-e-Sharif prison massacre. “I can think of a dozen things people can inquire into in Afghanistan.”

So can I. There’s the hanged man in Kandahar. Then there’s the sweating man with no legs. And the begging five-year-old. And the old couple in the wheelbarrows and the awful Cyclops with the pustulant right eye and the dead of Takhte-Pul and Kili Sarnad and Lashkargah and Bibi Mahru and the whole, swelling mass of humanity standing in the squalor of Chaman.

Not to mention the slaughter at Mazar-e-Sharif. And the War for Civilization. (The Independent)