Still, there were jitters. One British executive said he planned to send his wife and children home. Another man, a 50-something Northern Irish veteran of the British Army who helped supervise mine-clearing in Afghanistan, shrugged at the danger. "I'm not a saint; it's just my job," he said. Outside, private security guards with automatic rifles kept watch over his car.

fter five weeks, the decision was made to send me to Kabul, the Afghan capital, because my planned replacement was dispatched to Jerusalem to fill in for a Globe reporter who had been shot and wounded by Israeli troops in the West Bank. The new assignment was exciting, nerve-wracking and even more unpredictable than my stint in Pakistan.

Flying into Kabul via a U.N. humanitarian charter gave me a blunt introduction to a country that has been fought over by imperial powers since the time of Alexander the Great. Below the plane carrying aid workers, bureaucrats and reporters were vast arid tracts of high desert, largely unpopulated except for small clusters of mud-brick homes that cling to the narrow, arable sides of mountain-fed streams. At Kabul Airport, ringed by snow-capped peaks, the ruined carcasses of planes, tanks and artillery lay near the runway that provided the bombed-out capital with its most important lifeline.

Unlike Pakistan, the ravages of war were everywhere in Afghanistan. Two decades of unrelenting hostilities against the Russians, then a savage civil war followed by the bloody ouster of the Taliban had left their evidence in every corner of the country's historic capital and in every village through which I passed. Kabul's streets were obstacle courses pockmarked by years of shelling; block after block of simple homes had been reduced to clay ruins; 20,000 returning refugees poured into the devastated city every day from crowded camps in Pakistan; and packs of fierce Afghan soldiers, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, patrolled chaotic streets where law and order were concepts in name only.

I stayed in a rented home, which the Globe shared with the Financial Times of London, in what had once been the most fashionable section of Kabul. Behind a 10-foot-high wall and a steel gate topped with metal spikes we typed our stories onto laptop computers that fed the copy to our newspapers via satellite phones. We had a 24-hour Afghan guard who lived in small quarters beside the house, a cook who left after preparing dinner, plus two drivers and translators who arrived early every morning, accompanied us wherever we needed to go and stayed late into the evening until the day's work was finished.

After a 10 p.m. curfew every night, from behind a second-story window that looked across Kabul's rooftops to the nearby mountains, the news from Afghanistan flowed to the Globe. The silence of the quiet room was broken only by the patter of a keyboard. Although I worked alone, I have rarely felt as fulfilled.

Unlike the guerilla war in Pakistan, war news in Afghanistan was achingly visible. The international military coalition held a daily press briefing at 9:30 a.m. That briefing was followed by a U.N. news conference that invariably unveiled new information on the humanitarian disaster that had become Afghanistan: drought, earthquakes, refugees, infant mortality, prisoner abuses, locusts. There were so many stories, so much suffering, so much hope. But only so much time to write and report. In nine weeks, I counted only two complete days to myself.

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