THE MOST FATEFUL WEEK OF MY LIFE BEGAN with my arrival in Kabul. It was April 2008 and my first time back in Afghanistan since 1963 when, as a teenager, I spent a month traversing the country from Herat to Kandahar and Kabul. Then, the ruggedly beautiful country was at peace under the rule of a modernising king. Now, merely walking down any street carried the risk of being blown up by a Taliban suicide bomber.
As the jet from New Delhi came in to land, I spied from the window the lofty Hindu Kush snow mountains looming over the ancient city of Kabul. At ground level I found the old section of the city looked much the same as I saw it in 1963, dense huddles of mud huts scaling the foothills of the high mountains. But where the streets were then clogged with camels, donkeys and pony-drawn buggies, now cars, jeeps, military Humvees and black limousines with blacked-out windows honked horns in traffic jams. And where there were friendly tribesmen and city dwellers, there were now suicide bombers who struck without warning leaving human bodies mangled, vehicles in flames and buildings flattened.
Concrete barriers and bundles of razor wire lined many of the streets, and there was a creepy sense of extreme tension in the air. I got the firm feeling that you did not tarry in Kabul, but went about your business as swiftly as possible and then returned to what you hoped was the safety of your home or office.
THE CONTRAST BETWEEN peaceful Afghanistan in 1963 and the hell that it became could not have been greater. Besides being one of the world’s most hazardous countries, where peril lurked around every corner, it had become the world capital of heroin production with its opium forming the base of most of the global supply. In Afghanistan, opi-um production had soared to a record high. Much of it was grown where I was headed, the lawless tribal territory that nudged the border with Pakistan. My primary objective was to investigate poppy cultivation there, and the efforts of the notorious warlord, Gul Agha Sherzai, to stamp it out. The Afghan badlands, populated mostly by fundamentalist Islamic Pashtun, was also a vital bolthole for thousands of Taliban fighters.
Before heading east to Jalalabad to meet Sherzai, I stayed the night in Kabul with a friend of a friend, a big, bluff Afghan named Tariq. He was the very image of a Hollywood-style
