"I used to feel I could travel home whenever I wished," said Rahim Ahmed Khan, whose extended family lives outside Gardez, south of Kabul. "But between the insecurity and the bad weather that is on the way, I think it may be spring before I see them all again. I feel isolated."
President-elect Barack Obama will face the difficult task of trying to coax North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners to share more of the burden in Afghanistan. In anticipation, the insurgents have been turning their sights on the national forces of countries whose commitment to the war they perceive as wavering.
Early this month, militants killed two Spanish soldiers in western Afghanistan, a relatively peaceful part of the country. It was a little-noticed event in the United States but generated huge headlines in Spain. The newspaper El Pais reported on the hotly revived debate over whether Spain should keep its 700-troop presence here.
In coming months, insurgents are likely to conduct the kind of two-tiered war that was on display last week in Kandahar, when they staged attacks on a scale both publicly grandiose and wrenchingly intimate.
Near the center of the city, the Taliban used a fuel-filled tanker as a truck bomb, flattening part of a government compound and killing six people. President Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who works in the compound, escaped uninjured.
On the outskirts of town, assailants on a motorbike splashed acid on a group of girls dressed in their secondary-school uniforms. Two were in hospital with burns to their faces.
Taliban leaders have warned the public against sending girls to school, and some terrified parents said they would reluctantly comply, at least for now.
"These are the kinds of things that make it hard to live life, hard to hope for the future," said a mother of three girls in Kabul, who did not want her name used for fear of reprisal. When her children were small, she said, she told them the reign of the Taliban was over for good.
"Every day I tell my girls it is important not to be afraid," she said. "But even when I am talking, they can see for themselves that I am frightened."
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Julian Barnes, a writer in The Times' Washington Bureau, contributed to this report.
laura.king@latimes.com
julian.barnes@latimes.com
