HOME / dispatches: Notes from different corners of the world.

Losing HopeWhat happened to Afghans' stubborn optimism?

By Vanessa GezariUpdated Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2007, at 7:39 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

RSS

"Enormous," he said. "We need more and more and more."

On his desk lay several anti-poppy posters that could be seen hanging in tea shops around the country. Searching among the papers, he handed me a small, beaded cardboard circle that was meant to dangle from a car's rearview mirror. An artist had drawn a towering opium vine whose bulbs resembled the heads of monsters. The vines were attacking small figures: a farmer, an addict, a woman, a child, a soldier. The inscription said, "If we don't put an end to poppy, it will put an end to us." This, the official told me, was a quote from President Hamid Karzai.

When he left the room for a moment, Daud leaned over and stared at the inscription. One of the words had been crossed out, and another written in the margin. The message now read, "If we don't grow more poppy, it will put an end to us."

I made an appointment with Gen. Carlos Branco, spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force, which has 40,000 troops in the country. He told me that the Taliban were weak, even in the south, and that international forces routinely defeated them in battle. Then he named seven areas in the south and west where, in the last two weeks, the Taliban had seized control for a few hours or a day. They held control in none of those areas now, he told me.

I nodded and wrote this down. I did not tell him that when I was last here, the Taliban seizing control of seven places in two weeks, for any length of time, would have been unthinkable.

One day before dawn, a friend and I set off in Daud's turquoise station wagon and headed north to Baghlan, which on Nov. 6 was the site of the deadliest suicide bombing in Afghanistan's history. It killed six members of parliament and more than 60 schoolboys who had gathered at a sugar factory to meet them. The Taliban denied responsibility, but most people thought they had done it. Others blamed members of militant group Hezb-i-Islami loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an exiled warlord with followers in Baghlan.

The road to the sugar factory ran between cotton fields and mud hills. That such a large attack had occurred in the north, where the Taliban was thought to be weakest, surprised me. I asked Daud about it. He said that even in Kabul, which had been one of the safest places in the country, he could feel the war closing in. A friend of his had recently arrived from a neighboring province once considered well within the capital's security bubble. The friend said that although the province was fine during the day, the Taliban controlled it at night. "Before long," Daud said, "you will see fighting inside Kabul city."

In a dusty lane, we met Sayed Basir, an 18-year-old in a denim jacket with leather patches on the sleeves. Two of his friends and several relatives had died in the attack. He pointed to the tree near where the bomb exploded. It had been covered with blood and "the meat of human," he said, until the municipality came to clean it. I looked at the tree. Its bark was black and wet; the trunks nearby were pale gray.

"I feel the government is so weak," Basir said. "There is no security, no government, no administration. Especially in this province, nothing exists."

This was supposed to be Afghanistan's industrial heartland, but most people were out of work. Basir had graduated third in his class from the local high school and had been accepted at a business school in Kabul, but his family couldn't afford to support him there, so he had come home. His father had worked as a driver but was now unemployed. Basir said he couldn't find a job, either. He had enrolled in a private math class to occupy his time, but he found it increasingly difficult to envision a future in Baghlan.

"If the situation is like this, I will not do anything," he said. "I will leave Afghanistan."