The Road to Helmand

Before I leave for Kabul, I put my belongings in long-term storage, ship my cats home to Texas, rent out my apartment. I also prepare a power of attorney and my will.

October 2005

Our little plane hits the large swath of gravel that serves as an airstrip for Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand. The barrenness all around is astounding: no buildings, no parking lots, nothing but a few dust-colored structures.

A group of Afghan men with Soviet-era rocket-propelled grenade launchers watch us get off the plane. They follow every move I make, but I'm careful not to look them in the eye.

My living quarters are a bedroom and bath in a 10-bedroom, three-story pink stucco building that people call "the palace," short for "narco-palace." Blast-protection film covers the windows, and the security manager is preparing to hire a crew to fill thousands of sandbags to fortify the perimeter. The project office is in the same compound, so my commute is about six steps door to door.

The house speaks of rare wealth (and bad taste), but the periphery of our compound is just like everyone else's: rudimentary ditches filled with rubbish and a black-green soup of waste and water.

An American colleague takes me up to the roof. All around are grassless yards and square houses of mud or clay. Directly below us, a scrawny cow stands under a drought-shrunken tree, a chicken pecking at her hoof, while a child prepares to fly his plastic-bag kite. Passersby stare up in shock at the sight of a blond woman with an uncovered head. Ducking, I hurry back inside.

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One of 34 Afghan provinces, Helmand lies about 400 miles southwest of Kabul. It's home to the highly conservative Pashtun people. Poppy production was nearly unheard of here before the Soviet invasion in 1979. But today, most farmers grow poppy, along with smaller amounts of other produce. It's simple economics: A farmer can earn about $5,400 per hectare of opium yield, almost 10 times what he would get for a hectare of wheat.

In the 1950s and '60s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and USAID developed a 1,600-kilometer irrigation system in the province. Many residents remember a time when Lashkar Gah, with its newly paved streets and neat rows of tree-shaded houses, was called "Little America."

Today, much of the pavement is ruined, and the sagging former USAID homes look much older than they are. Meanwhile, massive, gaudy structures built with drug money rise around them. Because of their bizarre, strange-colored exteriors dotted with mirrors and decorative tiles, these narco-palaces are also referred to as "Pakistani wedding cakes."

* * *

I am the only woman on our team. I'd been warned that locals would think I was a prostitute brought from the West for the male staff of American, Australian, British and Latin American contractors, and that this perceived violation of Islamic morality would put the team at heightened risk.