In Those Days

In those days, February 2003, almost two years after 9/11, the weather in Afghanistan turned from winter to summer just like that, and an intense heat lacquered the sky a pale white, and all day long you felt the unrelenting intensity of the sun on the parched skin of your arms and face.

If you spent your time in Kabul, as I did, amid all the traffic and new high-rises and glass banks and garish mansions of government ministers, and mingled with the self-involved staff of dozens of nongovernmental organizations debating reconstruction strategies ("How will I spend 50,000 dollars?" an American with an NGO asked me one day. "I have 50,000 dollars left in my budget, and I have to spend it or my budget will be cut next year." "Maybe buy a Jeep?"), the Afghanistan war seemed to have wrapped up just as a new one in Iraq was coalescing. However, my editor told me to stay put in case the coming war prompted militant attacks. He did not define "stay put." So with Kabul booming and tedious, I paid a taxi driver, Khalid, to take me south to Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, where stubborn pockets of resistance to the U.S.-led military coalition still existed, providing hope that newsworthy reporting was still possible in this now-forgotten war. Before I left Kabul, a colleague gave me the name of a fixer and translator in Kandahar.

Had the 300-mile highway between Kabul and Kandahar, known as the Ring Road, been maintained, the drive would have taken about six hours. But Afghanistan had been pulverized by war since the Soviet Union invaded in 1979. When the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, a civil war followed. Then the Taliban assumed power in 1996 and faced resistance from northern warlords. After 9/11, the U.S.-led military coalition invaded. By then, the Ring Road and virtually all of the country resembled the ruins of an ancient civilization.

In 2003, driving the highway was one long slalom run around massive holes that pocked the road like giant footprints. I bounced in the passenger seat of an old, dented Toyota SUV, flailing about like a dashboard doll as Khalid drove in second gear, desert dust seeping through our windows. My spine felt like it was being shoved out the back of my head, and I questioned why I had not chosen to shell out the 250 dollars for a U.N. flight. The trip would have taken 20 minutes or less. But 250, shit. There was money to be made in Afghanistan.

Eight hours into the drive, I noticed a cluster of multicolored, patchwork tents anchored to the ground with rocks. Tethered donkeys and camels mouthed the stony soil for grass near a man who sat beside the carcass of a lamb, its dismembered head and feet piled to one side. He reached through its neck and pulled out flesh and organs and dropped the gore on a cloth beside him.

Dazed by the heat, I stared, fascinated by this spectacle, and told Khalid to stop. These people were Kochis, Pashtun nomads, Khalid explained. Kochis have no social status in Afghanistan, he continued. Farmers chase them off their land because their animals damage crops. One ethnic group in particular, the Hazara, descended from the Mongols and mostly Shias, despise the Kochis as a Pashtun tribe who collaborated with the Taliban. The Sunni Taliban massacred thousands of Hazaras in the late 1990s. Now with the Taliban out of power, the Hazaras were busy reclaiming the Kochis' grazing land.

The man looked at us as though he had been expecting us and continued gutting the lamb. A dying fire filled the air with the smell of smoldering wood. Khalid introduced us, and the man paused as he cleaned the carcass and called to a boy to bring tea. He apologized for the distraction of his work, but he had to finish and cook the meat and organs before they spoiled. Once the animal had been thoroughly gutted, he would sew the skin to carry water. He...