Afghanis blame the U.S. for violent cats

QOOCHI, Afghanistan — Whatever it is that is terrifying the villagers on this verdant northern plain studded with fruit trees and land mines, people here agree on whose fault it is: the U.S. military's.

Until a few months ago, no one had heard the name "pisho palang," or tiger cat, but since then, it has kept villagers indoors at night, terrified of attack.

Villagers say four or five people have been killed in cat attacks, cases that could not be traced. There are tales that dozens of people left villages in recent months to escape the creature.

A Kabul magazine conveyed the terror with its headline, "In Shomali, Dangerous Animals Are Eating People."

There are theories that the cats might have crossed the mountains from China, or perhaps are domestic cats gone so feral in the country's long wars that they acquired a taste for human flesh. But few people give those much credence.

These beasts, the popular view goes, did not just arrive. They were brought here. In the blinkered certainty of village logic, the arrival of two recent unwelcome groups of newcomers, U.S. soldiers and pisho palang, has to be related.

"Before this new army came here, we didn't have these cats," said Mohammad Yakob, 45, from Saidkhail village, near Charikar, north of Kabul

At times, the alleged American motives for releasing the pisho palang and supposed delivery methods strain common sense.

"We heard that foreigners are releasing them at night from planes to eat people. We heard that usually the tiger cats attack the throat and drink all the blood," said Mohammad Saber, also from Saidkhail.

Air delivery? But wouldn't the fall kill the cats?

"They fly really low," said Koko Gul, 20, of nearby Monara village, holding his hands a foot from the ground, "and they just drop the cats onto the ground."

Fazul Rahim, 28, of Saidkhail, said he knew a man who caught a pisho palang in a net. It had some kind of foreign stamp on its rump, he claimed.

"And some American came and he wanted to buy it for $5,000, but my friend wouldn't sell it," Rahim said.

He refused $5,000 for a cat?

"Yes. He said, 'Right now, they're paying $5,000, but maybe later they'll pay more,' " Rahim recounted.

In Qoochi village north of Kabul, Gul Afraz, 50, tells a tale, waving his arms, leaping up at times, to illustrate his heroism in bare-handedly wrestling and killing a pisho palang that attacked a boy three or four months ago.

"I had a pocketknife in my pocket; I opened it with my teeth and I stabbed him in the head again and again. And then he died." Gul Afraz says he buried the body.

In neighboring Dogh Abad village, the boy who was attacked, Rahim Dinn, 8, pulls back a ragged shirt to display scars on his chest and leg. He describes how the cat attacked before his sister, Mina, and Gul Afraz intervened.

In Qoochi village, Afsar Kahn, 11, has scars on his torso from an attack in February.

His cousin Abdul Hadi, 28, killed that cat but was bitten and died a month later, his body racked by trembling, said Hadi's father, Mirza Mohammad, 58. Some people grumble darkly that the American military could have imposed a curfew in the area but found the pisho palang a much more effective tool.

In Charikar, the main town in the area, police major Turyalai, 34, who goes by one name, said two dead specimens each had foreign-style white nylon collars around their necks, which proved that they had been kept and trained by humans.

Fellow policeman Ghulam Sarwar chortled dismissively when asked if police had investigated the matter with U.S. military authorities at Bagram.

"If we went to the Americans, they'd say, 'No, we didn't release them.' And who can tell them, 'Yes, you did do it'?"

In an e-mail response to the questions about the rumors, Col. Roger Davis rejected the villagers' assertions that American forces had released the tiger cats but did not say whether the Americans thought it important to correct the misconceptions.

"No, we don't use cats, killer cats, al-Qaida cats, mountain cats, tiger cats, pussy cats or any other cats to execute combat operations," he wrote.