First came the atrocities of the Soviets, who held the country, however tenuously, through the '80s; then the atrocities committed by the warlords, who lobbed shells at one another for the better part of the 1990s during a brutal civil war; and finally the atrocities committed by the Taliban, whose penchant for beating, amputating, imprisoning and otherwise humiliating is now solidly part of the public record.
The destruction of the country was deliberate and methodical. And above all, it was cooperative. Afghans were involved. Russians played a huge role. Pakistanis bear some responsibility, as do Iranians, Americans, Italians, Indians and Turks.
Today, all of Afghanistan's recent troubles are on display. The noonday sun bakes the rusting carcasses of tanks that line the roads leading into and out of the city. The torn remnants of Soviet fighter jets and helicopter gunships sit in an abandoned lot. The most noticeable feature of the soccer field in the middle of town is a bomb crater at mid-field.
And the city is one big knot of inconsistencies. Kabul is one of the highest capital cities in the world, sitting 6,000 feet above sea level, so you would expect at least a degree of fresh air moving off the mountains and through the city. Instead, the air here is rotten and, by midday, clogged by dust and diesel fumes.
It is a poor city, but our hotel rooms ran $150 a night. A beer—wretched, almost undrinkable Russian concoction that's smuggled across the border from Pakistan—runs $10 a bottle. This is a war-time economy. There are journalists here from some of the richest newspapers and networks in the world, and the Afghans know that. Two decades of uninterrupted war haven't numbed common sense.
This was the city that we walked into and each day it became increasingly clear that in order to tell our story, we would need to go back to the beginning—to a winter night in 1979—and work our way forward from there. Only then did we stand a chance of explaining how a country that had once held such promise could reach a point of such chaos.
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