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The explosions started.

On the Saturday before the August 20 election, I woke up about 4 AM, sick with food poisoning. The bomb shook the house a few hours later. We had been expecting a spectacular attack for months, and a photographer friend, Paula, and I rushed to the scene, right in front of NATO headquarters, right where the Afghan kids sold gum and bracelets, just down the road from the U.S. embassy. This attack was particularly audacious, designed to show that the Taliban could strike anywhere. Seven people died. At least ninety were injured. We stood behind a barrier of red-and-white tape, and all we could see were emergency vehicles, tree limbs and leaves on the ground, a car with its windows blown out and its lights on. An Afghan man in a peach button-up shirt and tan pants wandered around aimlessly, covered in blood. The journalists were all there, mostly young freelancers, hungry, new to Afghanistan, here for the election, for the excitement, talking about who got there first, who snapped the car still on fire, who saw the bodies. They were eager, like I had once been. One demanded that Peach Button-up Shirt answer his questions for the TV camera in English, please. I stood back from the tape. I felt almost done. I didn’t need to see any more bodies, didn’t want to stick my hand in any more human flesh, didn’t want to scrub any more people off the bottom of my shoes.

But I still wanted to see the election, a different kind of tragedy. On Election Day, Paula and I drove to various polling stations. Most were quiet, although I could hardly blame Afghans. Why risk voting when no candidate seemed particularly inspiring, when Karzai’s victory seemed assured? Compared to the first presidential election five years earlier, when people had lined up for hours for the privilege of voting, this day was just depressing. At one point, we hurried to a report of a shoot-out. The cops had shot one alleged terrorist—another may have escaped. We walked past the pickup truck with the terrorist’s body slung in the back like a side of beef and over to the crumbling building where police still searched for evidence. More and more kids and young men surrounded us, more and more journalists showed up, until finally, I decided I’d feel safer in the car. Soon after, I heard shouting and looked up—Paula was sprinting toward the car, flanked by four other huffing photographers. A gaggle of police ran behind them. I popped the back door open—photographers and cameras dove inside. Then we locked the doors. The police surrounded us, brandishing their guns. Apparently they had been told to seize all the cameras of the photographers and maybe the photographers themselves—the Afghan government had earlier banned publicity of Election Day attacks in another dramatic victory for freedom of speech here.

“They’re going to kill us!” one photographer shouted.

“Drive, just drive!” another screamed.

They were new. I felt strangely calm. I knew Afghanistan’s finest would never shoot. If they did, they’d never hit us. Paula, who had jumped in the passenger side of the car, stretched her foot across to the driver’s side and punched the gas. Once the car hopped forward, the police scattered. We roared down the road.

That was enough excitement for my day. Within minutes of the polls closing, Karzai’s people claimed victory. It was soon clear why. The fraud had been epic, the kind of fraud that would make dead voters in Chicago sit up and applaud. Ultimately as many as one in three votes would be deemed suspect. Karzai’s supporters would bear the most of the blame.

The fallout would smother and choke everything anyone was trying to do here. Karzai would eventually be declared the winner. But if this election was seen as crucial, then it was a crucial failure. Over the following weeks, the UN mission here would fracture. The Obama administration would waver on whether to send more troops to back a corrupt Karzai government and quibble over how best to solve the Afghan morass and nibble at the edges of the