Kandahar

After a U.S. special operations force secured a compound outside Kandahar recently, Army 1st Lt. Ashley White was sent in to search and interview Afghan women. Just after she arrived, a homemade bomb exploded, killing her and two Army Rangers. White, 24, was the first female soldier to die in combat while performing a unique new role for the Army. She was part of an elite cultural support team, first sent to Afghanistan in January in an attempt to overcome daunting cultural barriers in the deeply conservative Islamic country.

KABUL, Afghanistan - In many ways, the two young soldiers were not so different from each other. Each was tough-minded and physically powerful. Each worked hard to win a place in an elite military unit, and spoke with pride of serving his country. They were 25 years old, these two: one newly married, the other planning a wedding this year. Their upbringings were as disparate as their homelands were distant, but religious faith was entwined with the family lives of both.

Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Stories of Food During Wartime by the World's Leading Correspondents Edited by Matt McAllester University of California Press: 214 pp., $27.50

KABUL, Afghanistan - Turban bombs had become too obvious. So the two men who apparently set out Saturday to assassinate Kandahar's governor looked to their footwear instead. The assailants used the unusual tactic of concealing weapons and explosives in their boots to make their way past police checkpoints and into the governor's heavily guarded compound in the city of Kandahar, leading to a gun battle that left them and two Afghan police officers dead, a provincial spokesman said.

Last week, the nation's top military officer, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, journeyed carefully into Kandahar, the capital of Afghanistan's conservative Pashtun heartland, to talk with community leaders at a shura shura , the Afghan equivalent of a town meeting. It was a tense event in a dangerous place. To reach the meeting in the provincial governor's palace -- a graceful, arched building on a grassy square where Mullah Mohammed Omar, founder of the Taliban, once ruled -- Mullen, his aides and a group of reporters climbed into armored vehicles that rolled through eerily empty downtown streets as aircraft patrolled overhead.

Even before the jet lag had worn off after a visit to Kandahar earlier this year, I received a disturbing e-mail from a colleague there. An improvised explosive device had detonated outside the home of one of the members of the cooperative I help run. It had apparently been placed to target a convoy in which the district chief of police was traveling. Unharmed but outraged, the police chief ordered his subordinates to find out who owned the house. When my Afghan co-worker and his brother opened their gate, they were beaten and sworn at repeatedly, then hauled to police headquarters, where they spent the night.

KABUL, Afghanistan - In many ways, the two young soldiers were not so different from each other. Each was tough-minded and physically powerful. Each worked hard to win a place in an elite military unit, and spoke with pride of serving his country. They were 25 years old, these two: one newly married, the other planning a wedding this year. Their upbringings were as disparate as their homelands were distant, but religious faith was entwined with the family lives of both.

It was supposed to be a meeting about governance and development — two of the three pillars of the U.S. counterinsurgency effort in Kandahar province this summer. Instead, the shura, or assembly of local leaders, at a police station Monday turned into a gripe session about the third pillar: security. The elders complained bitterly about a U.S. military raid in their neighborhood, Kokaran, the night before, and about a big security sweep Saturday. Security defines daily existence here — for the military, for development workers and for Afghans.

Astride a black motorbike, he moves freely about the dusty, chaotic city he boasts the Taliban owns. "Our house," he calls it. "Our home." His nom de guerre is Mullawi Mohammadi, and he coolly declares that he and the Taliban fighters under his command have nothing to fear here in Kandahar, which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has vowed to clear of insurgents this summer. With tens of thousands of U.S. and other coalition troops either arriving or already deployed in Kandahar province to take part in the coming operation, it looms as one of the most crucial confrontations of Afghanistan's long war. But with the Taliban stitched into the city's fabric, it may prove a very difficult one. Mohammadi granted a rare interview in a bid to dispel what he said were misconceptions about the insurgents' aims.

Suspected Taliban gunmen burst into a mosque and gunned down the deputy mayor of Kandahar at his prayers, officials said Tuesday -- a brazen attack that underscored the immense challenges faced by Western forces as they push to restore law and order in the volatile southern city. Kandahar and its surrounding districts are the focus of an expected drive this spring and summer to try to expel the Taliban and establish credible governance in Afghanistan's second-largest population center.

There are days here, in these war-haunted times, when it seems that death might come in any guise, and from any direction. From a bomb buried in the earth. From the sky. From a rusted motorbike haphazardly parked in a busy marketplace, with no one paying it and its deadly package any notice. Or from a soldier who breaks down doors in the dead of night, with murder in mind. Despite a shared sorrow and bewilderment, a jarring disparity has emerged in the way Americans and Afghans view the killings of 16 villagers in rural Kandahar province, allegedly at the hands of a lone U.S. Army staff sergeant named Robert Bales.

This has been one of the worst fortnights in the increasingly unhappy 10 1/2-year Afghan war for NATO and, above all, the United States and its ally, Britain. First there was the burning of the Korans at Bagram air base, which unleashed a wave of religious fury and revenge killings of U.S. troops. Then came the deaths of six British soldiers, incinerated by a giant Taliban bomb last week, which pushed the British death toll in the war over the symbolic 400 mark. Support in Britain for an increasingly unpopular war further deteriorated.

Suspected insurgents fired automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades Tuesday at a government delegation offering condolences to villagers in a district of Kandahar province where a U.S. soldier is accused of going on a shooting rampage. No one in the delegation, which included two brothers of President Hamid Karzai and a number of high-level officials, was injured, but a member of the Afghan security forces was killed and another was wounded, witnesses and officials said. Members of the delegation, which also included the Afghan army chief of staff, a Cabinet minister and the Kandahar governor, had just emerged from a mosque in Panjwayi district when gunfire erupted, officials said.

REPORTING FROM KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- Prayers and muffled sobs filled the air Monday during remembrances by Afghan villagers for 16 of their neighbors, nine of them children, who were killed a day earlier during a shooting rampage allegedly carried out by an American soldier. In the capital, Kabul, parliament passed a resolution condemning the "brutal and inhuman" act by the accused assailant, identified by the U.S. military as a sergeant who acted alone in his attack on civilians near his base in Kandahar province.

The staff sergeant who turned himself in after the recent shooting deaths of 16 Afghan civilians was based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, a sprawling suburban Army facility south of Tacoma, Wash. It's the biggest military base on the West Coast - and one of the most troubled in the Army. Lewis-McChord, a major staging area for troops going to and from Iraq and Afghanistan, has been plagued over the last two years by a wave of suicides, killings and domestic violence.

When gunfire echoed in the darkness before dawn, many villagers assumed it must be a night raid, in which U.S.-led troops swoop down on residential compounds across Afghanistan to arrest suspected insurgents. So the safest course, people thought, was to stay quiet and remain indoors. But for some on Sunday, home was no safe haven. The gunman found them. Chanted prayers and muffled sobbing filled the air on Monday during remembrances by Afghan villagers for 16 of their neighbors, nine of them children, who were killed a day earlier during a shooting rampage that authorities said was undertaken by a lone American soldier near his base in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan.

The clusters of bodies heaped in a rural Kandahar hamlet have given rise to the inevitable question: Are U.S.-Afghan relations now too tainted for the nations to move ahead as allies in this war? On Sunday, a lone American serviceman slipped away from his base in southern Afghanistan before dawn and went on a methodical house-to-house shooting spree in a nearby scatter of Afghan homes, killing 16 people as they slept, nearly all of them women and children, according to Afghan officials who visited the scene.

The desert's nighttime chill had taken hold at a small U.S.-Afghan base in the Taliban's heartland: the home village, in fact, of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement's founder and supreme commander. For the American troops manning the outpost, though, the danger came not from outside the wire, but from within. Hours before dawn Thursday, Afghan assailants, including a man hired to teach Afghan soldiers to read, shot and killed two U.S. troops and wounded a third, Afghan and American officials said.