This e-mail has been making rounds on the internet for over a month now. Some have suggested it's a hoax, but it's not. It's from the children's author Tamim Ansary. He writes "Some say, why don't the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they're starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan -- a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban." (You can read the original e-mail at Salon.com.)

My instinct was that he had to be exaggerating. But any of these sites confirm his sobering e-mail as fact:

• more on life expectancy


• more on widespread civilian displacement, human rights abuses, and malnutrition


• more on the use of child soldiers by all warring parties


• more on landmines and abandoned ammunition