By ROBERT FISK
KABUL - Tamim's family live in Joee Sheer, which means the Stream of Milk.
But outside his slum home there flows a stream of warm, reeking sewage. Never was there more reason to take off your shoes at a wooden door.
Inside, you climb a narrow staircase and step into an antechamber in which Tamim's mother sits on the floor. She wears a purple scarf and the skin around her eyes, after four weeks of crying, is heavy and blistered.
Tamim, of course, is dead; which is why I am sitting in this tiny room opposite this quiet, solemn woman.
Her son's killer was a small round yellow cylinder buried beneath the ground - a small fragment of an American cluster bomb that was infinitely more sophisticated and more efficiently made than anything in this ramshackle home.
Tamim worked for the Halo Trust, the mine-clearing operation to which Princess Diana gave so much publicity, and he was an experienced man, 25 years old, with four years of de-mining to his name.
"I know what I'm doing," he used to tell his mother.
"It was partly because of our poverty that he did the work," she says.
"I took him to the Halo office for this job. He got NZ$284 a month.
"On the morning of his death, he had been taking a rest in the minefield. He had some yoghurt and sat in a corner and all of a sudden there was an explosion.
"His uncle came home that day - it was a month ago - and he was crying. He said he had a headache. Then he said that Tamim had injured himself.
"The moment he said injured, I knew that it was over. But thank God at least my son died a dignified death, trying to save other people's lives. He didn't die robbing or torturing or killing."
The family think they will receive around $39,940 in compensation, not much in comparison to the $176,400 that a dead American mine-clearer's family might expect.
But these are Afghan prices for Afghans dying in Afghanistan while trying to destroy America's weapons.
The mines, of course, come from a host of countries, some from the old "evil empire", others from the current "axis of evil" and, needless to say, many from the "civilised" countries which are fighting the war of "good against evil": Iran, Korea, the old Soviet Union, the new Russia, Belgium, Italy, the United States and Britain.
But Tamim was killed by an American cluster bomb, 20 per cent of whose "bomblets" bury themselves in the ground, turning themselves into mines.
When the Americans dropped this ordnance on the Taleban, they must have known this; they must have known that each of their missions in their "war on terror" would later cost the lives of countless innocent Afghans.
Sitting on the table of Abdul Latif Matin, the cluster bomblet looks more like a toy than a killer. It is round and yellow with a canvas fan on the top. "BOMB. FRAG BLU 97A/B 809420-30 LOT ATB92G109-001" is printed on the side. BLU stands for Bomb Live Unit and there are 202 of these little murderers inside each 430kg CBU Combined Effects Munition dropped by American planes.
Matin is regional manager of the United Nations Mine Clearing and Planning Agency in Kabul, with 15 mine action organisations including Halo, operating 4700 staff across Afghanistan. Statistics, for him, have no emotions. His office covers seven provinces around Kabul in which 1.1 million unexploded bombs and mines have been cleared.
In these de-mining operations, around 100 Afghans have died. More than 500 have been injured, many of whom return to the minefields to work once their wounds are healed.
The thousands of other victims are a kind of limbless army. They queue at the Mirweis Hospital in Kandahar for artificial legs.
They watch another small army of prosthesis specialists carving and shaping the legs and arms of future victims. They stand in the darkened ruins of this grim, hot city. But it is the cluster bomb, the newest and deadliest of Afghanistan's hidden mines, that absorbs the work of Abdul Latif.
"The coalition forces claimed that only 5 per cent fail to explode but we think the figure is nearer to 15 per cent," he says.
"Just a few days ago three children were wounded. One of them threw this bomblet at another. She thought it was a toy. The trouble with the BLUs is that they go underground. They caused our two most recent fatalities among de-miners.
"I've seen very, very bad tragedies. I have taken the dead bodies of my own colleagues to their families. I've had to look at their wives and children.
"It's totally unfair and that's why the Afghans themselves have started a campaign to ban landmines."
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