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“Somebody’s messed up,” the captain muttered. Now he had to get approval to drop another bomb, which took hours.

The insurgents stayed in the safe house, allegedly, and this time, when the bomb was dropped, it hit the right target, setting off secondary explosions, likely from ammunition inside.

The Taliban had started seizing on such mistakes, especially in a hostile zone like Helmand Province, where people were more than willing to believe the worst of the U.S. military. It didn’t matter that much of Afghanistan was backward, occasionally primitive. Most Afghans seemed to have an almost religious faith in American technology, talking about how U.S. troops could drop a bomb on a two-inch target, and how if they missed, they missed on purpose.

The next day a patrol was sent to the site to inspect the rubble and talk to nearby villagers. The story was the same as elsewhere: No Taliban here. Security is fine. Please leave.

After four days, during which I bathed with gritty wet wipes and figured out the long odds, I got out of Camp Hell. I had seen no real government and little aid that mattered. The United States had set up a tiny base in the middle of Taliban territory and started firing off howitzers every night, a move that probably terrified any Afghans who might have wanted them around. The base wasn’t protecting anyone or able to win any hearts or minds. Instead, it stirred up a hornet’s nest, with no conceivable way to calm it down, no real alternatives to poppies, no government authority. The United States did not bear all the blame. The lack of resources and troops here was the product of years of outrageous neglect by the entire international coalition.

Soon after I left the Musa Qala outpost, set up at considerable expense by the Americans to pave the way for the British, the British arrived. Almost immediately, the British closed the base, deeming that they needed to actually be with the people in the town of Musa Qala to do an effective counterinsurgency. So the base was moved, but that didn’t really work, either. The Taliban constantly fired at the new outpost’s landing zone. Worried about being shot down, many helicopters simply turned back to the main British base, Camp Bastion.

With obvious supply problems and no reinforcements, British troops had little hope of dealing with the Musa Qala threat. The Taliban fought hard and dirty. The Brits spread out, fighting in the districts of Garmsir, Sangin, and Gereshk. The Danes relieved the Brits in Musa Qala, but were quickly replaced by the Brits again. So the British commander made a controversial decision in the fall of 2006—again, a few months after I was there—to respect a truce between the weak Afghan government and the tribal elders of Musa Qala, who swore up and down and promised a hundred times over that they would keep the Taliban away. The Taliban allegedly agreed. After the deal held for a month, the British moved out their troops, much to the consternation of the United States. These truces had been tried repeatedly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, had been criticized repeatedly by NATO and Afghan officials, and had failed repeatedly. Nonetheless, this time it would be different, the British maintained.

Months later, in February 2007, the Taliban took over Musa Qala and jailed all tribal leaders who had agreed to the truce. It would be another ten months before NATO could reclaim Taliban Town.

CHAPTER 11

MY NEW HOUSE

The night was not one of those blind-drunk ones at L’Atmosphère, not one when couples kissed sloppily in the bushes or the bathroom, or when people kept drinking until the sameness seemed fun, or when someone fell asleep leaning against a tree, or when a security guy tried to convince women, some successfully, that he was researching Real World Kabul for MTV. About midnight, with the crowd winding down, we called a taxi from the leading taxi company that catered to foreigners in Kabul and charged only $5 per stop. These taxis were safe, and they knew every place that