PITY the victims of a war that has gone out of fashion. Pity those who suffer on when the world has grown bored with the rocket attacks and the children and the thousands to create new ethnic crises in lands.
After the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the conflict provided a useful sideshow to the cold war, with the superpowers lurking behind their proxies. Subsequently the Russians had their puppet ruler, Mr Muhammad Najibullah, installed in 1986. He was opposed by the Americans and their allies, who backed a grim rainbow of fundamentalists. The fierce fighting in this mountainous, often primitive country, was well covered by the western press, and often on the front page. Afghanistan mattered.
And in 1996? According to a UNICEF estimate, 400,000 children have died in the Afghanistan war, let alone the toll of adults. Five million people have just "disappeared". The country is devastated. Its strategic geographical position hasn't changed, but a sort of geopolitical "trendiness" has deserted it.
While the world is (justifiably) concerned with the treatment of female Chinese orphans and busy watching the skirmishing in remote Chechnya, the people of Afghanistan go on wearily eating the bitter black bread of war.
Last Friday the UN envoy to Afghanistan, Mr Mahmoud Mestiri, arrived in Pakistan for yet another attempt to talk peace with representatives of the ever changing factions. Mr Mestiri, a former Tunisian foreign minister, recommended that a 28 member council take over from the government of President Rabbani last November. This, like so many initiatives, has gone nowhere so far.
Simultaneous with Mr Mestiri's latest mission, Amnesty International published a report on Afghanistan. Amnesty says the situation has worsened since a number of mujahideen groups gained prominence, in 1992. Its report is packed with depressing statistics and sickening anecdotes.
For starters, there is the story of a woman in Kabul, the devastated capital, who ran from her home during a lull in the lengthy bombardment in 1994, looking for food. She was grabbed by two men who took her to a house where more than 20 mujahideen fighters raped her, for three days. When she managed to get back to her house she found her three young children dead of hypothermia.
Afghanistan does not present a well scripted war. The plot is too, confused. Unlike the Gulf War, with its neat bad guy in Saddam Hussein, there are too many protagonists, too much to remember and not enough incentive (like oil) for western powers to force a settlement.
The competing mujahideen parties, mostly Islamic fundamentalist, are forever swapping partners, splitting and forming new coalitions. For those who found the permutations in the Bosnian conflict challenging, Afghanistan is 10 times as bad. And Amnesty International makes clear in its report that no faction is blameless. It says its rapporteurs have not been able to find a single instance of any soldier or "guard" having been disciplined for an act of unwonted violence, and yet there are literally thousands of such incidents on record.
One of Amnesty's main criticisms is the complete lack of morality with which powerful countries on either side of the ideological divide have distributed, or permitted distribution of, arms to the different groups. In the 1980s when there was a CIA interest in discrediting the Marxist Leninist Watan ("Homeland") party of Najibullah, the arms channelled to Watan's opponents were in theory part of the great campaign against the Evil Empire. But after that threat had abated, the arms supply continued.
Amnesty says it takes "no position" on the civil war in general, nor on the trade of armaments. But it does oppose strongly the transfer of military equipment when human rights abuses occur as a result - and that is what is happening constantly in Afghanistan. Mary Lawlor of Amnesty International's Irish section, says ending or limiting this transfer is the organisation's main practical aim in this war. The human costs of these arms transfers have been borne by defenceless men, women and children," she says. "No family in Kabul, just to take one example, has been left untouched by the war."
Now, it is only when the Taliban, the fundamentalist student movement which has become an important driver of the conflict, does something particularly whacky, that the war gets much western attention. The perceived "eccentricities" of these effective soldiers are entertaining - if you don't happen to be living in a society splintering under much more serious pressures.