Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2007 | Page 71

Broken Bodies, Disruptured Landscapes 67 What's Left NATO forces brought a new wave of bio-power to Afghanistan in the form of uranium-alloyed precision weapons used during Operation Enduring Freedom, which have contaminated both people and land. For NATO such contamination was justified in assisting the necessary humanitarian aid to Afghan people. Gittoes’ reluctance bespeaks the “historical crisis of witnessing”.^^ In a similar vein Caruth and Athanasiou address the “unrepresentational nature of trauma” and its unavailability for witnessing."*^^ Maurice Blanchot writes in The Writing of the Disaster, “there is a limit at which the practice of any art becomes an affront to the affliction”."^' As Gittoes discloses: Never before have I felt the drawing of a subject’s physical likeness to be so totally inadequate as a means of communicating their presence. In that room the door between life and earth was wide open—his bed suspended above an abyss, Abdul clinging to life—his spirit floating inches above his body unable to draw away—while his mother’s prayers keep him suspended between realties.^* In his essay on terrorism in a post-September 11 world, John Carroll reminds us of the West’s relationship with Afghanistan. “We will destroy Afghanistan, in order to rebuild it anew. .. Then everything will be back in order, as it was.”*^‘^ As I have suggested, the introduction of landmines (an aspect of the global arms trade) has disintegrated Afghan social networks and