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broadcaster permitted in Afghanistan is Radio Shariat, which offers a schedule consisting of religious programmes and heavily censored news bulletins, and is light on chuckles.
    The sole legal amusement I detect in a week in Afghanistan is pestering foreigners. Everywhere I walk, I get followed by droves of people, children and adults alike, a few begging, most just curious. One afternoon in Kabul, while I’m standing outside a mosque watching punters arrive for prayers, a kindly shopkeeper scuttles up with a chair. When I sit down, I am surrounded by dozens of people, staring and gawping. They eventually crowd so close that the first few rows land in my lap. I have a sudden insight into how deeply tiresome it must be to be famous.
     
    THE SPINGHAR HOTEL in Jalalabad is situated at the end of a gravel drive amid pretty and well-kept gardens. By the front door is a sign bearing a picture of a Kalashnikov assault rifle with a red cross painted over it. Classy place, obviously.
    Jalalabad, capital of the province of Nangarhar, is a grim footnote in British imperial history. It was here, in January 1842, that an early attempt at bringing this wilful country to heel came to an end, when a Dr. Brydon, the only surviving member of a 17,000-strong British army that had marched to Kabul three years previously, rode into the city on a lame horse.
    There’s not much of anything in Jalalabad today, except dust. The streets are paved with it, the people covered in it, the buildings apparently built from it, and the chicken I’m served at the Spinghar tastes of it. Jalalabad does have a bazaar, and though it’s a common fantasy among middle-class western dilettantes that markets in remote third world towns are full of picturesque natives selling each other exquisite hand-crafted jewellery and organic hair conditioner, there’s nothing for sale in Jalalabad except whatever crap fell off the back of the last truck that came through: plastic crockery from Uzbekistan, Azerbaijani chocolate and a startling amount of Pepsi Cola, stacked everywhere in blue crates.
    In the centre of Jalalabad, there’s a traffic roundabout, around which
a large crowd is gathered. I gather with it for a bit to see what they’re waiting for. After an hour, I decide that maybe 300-a-side staring-silently-into-the-middle-distance has been decreed a right-on Islamic sport, or something, and leave them to it. That evening, when I go to meet someone in the UN compound, I’m told that the mob had been gathering to watch local Talibs administer a kicking to one of their own—for “dishonesty,” apparently. At the hotel at dusk, a few local women are sitting gossiping beneath a tree. When they see me approaching, they pull their masks back down over their faces, and fall silent.
    I leave Jalalabad for Kabul the following morning with Noel Spencer, a genial Northern Irishman who, after years defusing things for the British Army in Northern Ireland and the Kuwaiti Royal Family in Kuwait, now does the same for the UN’s mine clearance operation in Afghanistan. His experienced driver and his new 4WD pick-up take nine hours to negotiate the 200 or so kilometres between the two cities. At best, the road, devastated by decades of neglect, tanks and mortars, is appalling. At worst, it just isn’t there, degenerating into interminable sequences of ridges and cracks that engender the strange feeling of being seasick on dry land. More than once, the horizon disappears behind the lip of potholes big enough to fit the entire truck in.
    Which, given Afghanistan’s horizons, is an accomplishment. If the people of Afghanistan take the Almighty a little more seriously than most, they could rightly argue that this is where He’s done some of his best work. Snow-white and basalt-black mountain ranges as jagged as an Albanian bank’s profit-and-loss charts cradle the sort of sweeping green plains that make me wish that I had a troop of cavalry I could charge across them. Next