Entry 1:

If it's a Monday in Islamabad, I must be trying to get an Afghan visa. For plenty of the foreign reporters camping out here in the Pakistani capital, a few hours' drive and a couple thousand bureaucratic and physical roadblocks away from the Taliban, that's a leading objective every day. Two months after the World Trade Center put this troubled country back on the map, this sleepy government town has become a bit like Casablanca: Everyone's waiting for a visa. And there are vultures, vultures everywhere. One day, the price to get to the top of the list is supposed to be $1,000. The next day, it's $3,500. How much of it goes to the nice Pakistani journalist who's hooking you up? Who knows?

Until last week, a daily briefing at the Taliban's embassy here was our main window into the world north of the border. With cameras, tape recorders, and cell phones in tow, your crack correspondents from the global media would troop down to the dingy bungalow that houses what is now the regime's only ambassador in the whole world. In one story, I called the press conference the Taliban Follies. It was fun for one and all: We'd sit on the lawn in the sun. The ambassador would sit on a cushioned seat on the veranda. He'd accuse America of such crimes as genocide, terrorism, and the telling of "whooping lies." We'd ask for details. Via a translator whose skills suggest that English rhetoric wasn't a popular subject back at the Madrassa, he'd mainly avoid them. The Urdu media here, never sticklers for specificity, gave his allegations of U.S. losses and Western malfeasance huge play.

Knowing a PR debacle when they see one, the Pakistanis shut down the Follies last week. But the Afghan embassy's real draw—the one that was on display each day when the ambassador ended his press conference and hordes of reporters descended like horny jocks at a Catholic-school mixer upon his turban-clad embassy underlings in search of those elusive visas—carries on. It's just that now it's happening everywhere. I took the day off yesterday and sat by the pool. But still the cell phones buzzed with rumors: The Taliban will have a list out today for its third media convoy. No, the list will be out Tuesday. No, the fall of Mazar-i-Sharif has trashed their ability to deliver anything. I know a guy who can get the visas for $3,500. Oh, yeah? I heard that a TV network had ponied up $5,000. Someone said they might actually take women this time. But I heard that the ambassador said they wouldn't take Americans. Or will they, if the bribe is good enough? And so it goes.

Officially, all you have to do to get a visa for that now-smaller part of the country the regime controls is to turn in a form, a couple pictures, and a photocopy of your passport. And then, of course, there's the essay portion of your application: a letter explaining why you want to go to Afghanistan. Assuming that someone actually intended to read the letter, I wasn't sure just what kind of answer would be appealing: As a longtime salesman for the Gillette Corp., I feel your country is an untapped market for our new Mach 3 line of razors? Ever since I began working for the Mossad, I've wanted to run our Kandahar bureau? The guys down at Delta house told me the chicks in Kabul wear even tighter burqas than the chicks in Saudi Arabia? I settled for lamely assuring the embassy that I wanted the world to know what they were facing, which is of course true, but which I guess is also kind of the journalistic-groveling equivalent of "you've got a great personality."

The essay question on the application isn't the only way the permanent media encampment here is starting to remind me of college, complete with cliques, romances, and jealousy over residence-hall assignments. I think, in fact, that some aspiring sociologist could put together a master's dissertation on group behavior based on the Islamabad press corps. After the crisis began, we rushed in, descending on the Marriott Hotel, Islamabad's only five-star outpost, hiring overpriced fixers in its lobby, eating in its restaurant, learning every last bloody note of the songs on its in-house Muzak loop. But as the weeks have worn on, the scene has dispersed: Reporters here for the long haul have rented houses. Unhired fixers have gone back to their day jobs. With the story unfolding across a border that remains closed, routine has been established.

I myself moved off campus a couple of weeks ago, opting for a family friend's guest house here, where an elderly cook named Iqbal looks after me and obliges me to practice Urdu, a language I spoke even before I spoke English when I lived in Pakistan as a toddler. Having a life, and—sort of—a home has made life a lot easier, especially on Sundays like yesterday. For the first few weeks here, I'd be miserable at the end of a day off, deprived of the adrenaline rush that has kept me going. But not last night, as the weird dusty Pakistani dusk settled and I banged away at my laptop and drank Iqbal's tea and worked the phones to set up another week's worth of interviews and appointments with folks who might help me suss out political news from Afghanistan and listen for political turmoil in Pakistan. Maybe I'll get to cancel them and make a run for the border. Or maybe I'll be swilling Iqbal's tea again at dusk tomorrow.