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to the road, the mighty Kabul River flows green, then grey, then silver, before disappearing as the road heads up to the plateau on which Kabul sits, and winds through immense gorges which look awesomely forbidding and final, like exits from the entire universe.
    Villages, made entirely from mud, hunch along the roadside. In one, too small to merit a name, we stop for lunch in a mud room where the floor is also the table, and the only way to pick the difference between the flies and the sultanas in the stew is that the sultanas are marginally less animated. In another town, Sarobi, there is a shop, operating out of a converted shipping container, offering for sale an
impressive range of used assault rifles, mortars, grenade-launchers and anti-tank weapons. The shipping container next door is piled high with more crates of Pepsi.
     
    WEDNESDAY MORNING, THE first thing I do is the first thing all visiting media in Kabul have to do: check in with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The press office is run by a cheery old buzzard called Dr. Aminzai, a career civil servant who had a reputation, during previous regimes, as an impeccably groomed, Armani-clad dandy trailing clouds of imported aftershave. He wanted to keep his job, and so now wears a traditional robe and turban, and a beard you could hide crates of bootlegged Pepsi in. He makes me fill in some forms, gives me a Taliban press card, and reads me the riot act.
    “You must stay,” he says, “at the Intercontinental Hotel.”
    I checked in last night. It’s up on a hill commanding glorious views of Kabul, though the swimming pool and the cocktail bar haven’t seen use in some time. It has 150 staff and 200 rooms, but only two are currently occupied—mine, and one up the hall by a hotel employee who opens his door and booms, “Hello, Mr. Andrew!” every time I walk in or out (as the week wears on, I will try to catch him by leaving again straight after arriving, or creeping out at four in the morning to run up and down the deserted upstairs corridors, but he doesn’t miss a trick).
    “You must not take pictures of people,” continues Dr. Aminzai.
    I wasn’t going to try. Several photographers have been attacked by the Taliban for committing photography, though it isn’t illegal, as such—I later get a smudged black-and-white portrait of myself taken by a bloke on a street corner with an ancient box camera.
    “And,” he says, “you will not be able to talk to women.”
    That’s okay, I tell him. It’s like that at home.
    “It will mean trouble for you,” he says, ignoring my feeble, if heartfelt, attempt at levity, “and more trouble for them.”
    With that, Dr. Aminzai introduces my Taliban-appointed translator/ minder, whom I’ll call Akbar. Akbar is a twenty-one-year-old student at Kabul University. He’s not Taliban himself, but is happy to make a few dollars conducting journalists around town for them. Akbar speaks excellent English, and we get on surprisingly well, given that we both, I think, feel like we’re trying to explain earth to a martian.

    “You are not married?” enquires Akbar over lunch one day.
    No.
    “But you are twenty-nine.”
    Correct.
    “How is this?”
    Oh, I don’t know. Stuff.
    “But you have had girlfriends?”
    Mmm.
    “And you have. . . lain with them?”
    In general, yes.
    “What becomes of them, when you have finished with them?”
    They struggle on.
    “But what other man will want them?”
    It’s a topic we return to frequently, especially when Akbar—a devout Muslim, and engaged to be married—introduces me to other people. The first thing he explains to them is my unattached status, which he seems to find more extraordinary the more he thinks about it—the people he tells couldn’t seem more surprised if he told them that I had a tail. I begin to wish that I’d said to Akbar from the off what I’d been saying to the equally curious merchants in the bazaar back in Peshawar (“Yes, her name’s Winona,