That's good money in Kabul and Kandahar, and unfortunately the workers can look forward to long-term employment -- if the job doesn't kill them.

According to HALO USA, a not-for-profit organization that destroys explosive items left in the wake of war, it will take another 15 years to clear the most-mined country in the world of its deadly detritus.
Every year, more than 20,000 land mines are discovered in the worst way possible: A person or an animal steps on one, and it explodes.

More than 20 million of these devices are still in the ground somewhere in the world -- a residual of battles won and lost, of territory held and abandoned.

Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola, Iraq, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somaliland -- all are nations trashed by what HALO USA Vice President Nigel Robinson called "ridiculously simple and cheap" munitions during a speech last week to the Rotary Club of Fort Worth.

Anti-personnel is an apt description for weapons that cannot distinguish between animal or human, civilian or soldier, child or adult.

They devastate already devastated people -- the civilian victims of war. They make vast tracts of land unusable for farming, ranching, housing or development -- exactly the activities needed to lift a nation beyond the ravages of war.

Nations without sophisticated weapons systems or the money to buy them justify the use of land mines as a way to secure land from an encroaching enemy -- although that argument hardly explains America's continued refusal to join 150 other nations in signing the 1997 mine ban treaty.

Yet even if every nation signed and ratified the treaty tomorrow, the killing wouldn't end. Unless organizations like HALO USA clean up the mechanisms of war, these "ridiculously simple and cheap" land mines are, in truth, time bombs.
 

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