Proof of P.J.

At about half-past nine, my driver and I arrived at a roadblock set up just outside of Bagram Air Field manned by U.S. soldiers and some Afghan military. I would later learn that a VBIED (vehicle borne IED) threat had been called in to the checkpoint so traffic was stopped dead. Forty or so cars—driven by local Afghanis—were stuck, waiting to get onto the base. Even U.N. vehicles were being turned away.

I got out of the car and approached the soldiers, who were all heavily armed and very testy. I explained my situation to a young grunt. He was extremely courteous and told me that as soon as the roadblock was lifted, my driver and I would be the first ones through. He accompanied me back to my car and as we were walking, a sedan gunned its engine, coming straight for us. I dropped behind the soldier and he immediately shouldered his weapon, marching towards the car, screaming, “What the fuck are you doing?!? Stop NOW!” The sedan stopped and the soldier lowered his machine gun. He smiled and looked at me. “Everybody speaks weapon,” he said, chuckling.

I checked out of the fabulous Safi Land Hotel in downtown Kabul this morning and took a taxi about an hour outside of town to Bagram.

It was my first time seeing Kabul in the daylight. The city revealed itself to be a dazzling mashup of endless poverty, punctuated by brand new buildings of glass and steel, all ringed by stunning, jagged, snowcapped peaks.

The poverty is much like what you’d find in southern African cities. Underfed livestock and people live together in mud shacks or shipping containers that seemed to be randomly scattered throughout the city. Women in head to toe burkas float like specters amidst the trash and animal shit while children walk barefoot to school through traffic that has neither rules or compassion for pedestrians.

Police and Afghan military personnel lounge about with rifles hanging like afterthoughts from their shoulders, stopping cars at random and hassling taxi drivers.

The smog is unbelievable. Overloaded trucks belch nimbus clouds of black smoke, which mixes with the smoke coming off the fires that everybody is burning to keep warm. There’s no grass here, and the dirt on the ground swirls into the air, creating dust devils that only add too the choking, gritty atmosphere.

As we moved out of town the land opened up, stretching out to the horizon in brown, hard-packed flats, broken only by clusters of mud-walled huts or the occasional emaciated cow.

Every twenty minutes or so, we’d speed through a village center. These were mostly clusters of three sided, tin-roofed stores selling cokes, cookware and trinkets. Hundreds of people crowded the side of the road, waiting for taxis or minibus rides into a neighboring town or Kabul. The minibuses are similar to minivans and drivers will often cram a dozen or more people into them, charging a few dollars a head.

Of course these guys drive like maniacs. Sometimes they’ll pass two abreast on the left-hand side, playing double chicken with oncoming traffic.

My driver was pretty good, abstaining from any high-speed theatrics and getting me where I needed to go with a quickness.