The Commander’s wife soon brought out a tray of cups and a flask of green tea and placed them on the floor in the middle of our circle. A pretty woman wearing a floor-length skirt and a long top, with her hair tied in a messy bun, she appeared to be much younger than the Commander. She sat down across from me, gave me a friendly look, and poured the tea. When the Commander paused to take a sip, she said something to him and nodded in my direction. “My wife is asking if you are married,” he said. I indicated that I was, then, anticipating the next question, said I had three kids: two girls and a boy. Her eyes widened. Why, she wondered, had my husband let me come so far by myself? And who was looking after the children in my absence?

I’d encountered this line of questioning elsewhere in South Asia, and had initially believed the women were envious. In fact, though, they generally just felt sad for me, thinking my husband didn’t care enough to protect me by keeping me close to home. It was always a sobering lesson in cultural relativism. I told the Commander’s wife my husband was good with the children, and that if there were problems my mother lived nearby.

When we finally finished with the pictures, it was after 1 a.m. The Commander wanted to show me some videos, but I had to leave, so I thanked him and we said our goodbyes. During the ride back to the guest house, I thought about how he had been most lively and at ease while talking about his days as a fighter. Questions about his political life and the future of the country had produced stilted answers.

Why was it that these old fighters had been tapped to lead Afghanistan, I wondered? They weren’t providing physical security — the Indian embassy had nearly been blown up that very day. Nor were they providing economic security. Contrary to the Commander’s claim, every Afghan most certainly did not have a car.

I returned to Afghanistan almost eight months later, in March of 2009. The country was even further on edge. Prior to this second visit, there had been acid attacks on schoolgirls in Kandahar and an accidental bombing of a wedding party by nato forces. Insurgency was on the rise all over the south and east. The International Council on Security and Development had just released a report estimating that the Taliban had a permanent presence in 72 percent of Afghanistan, up from barely over half the year before. Kabul was wrapped in extra layers of razor wire, and government and foreign buildings had been fortified with thicker blast walls and bigger sandbag piles, leaving the streets virtually impassable.

The weather my first week mirrored the city’s funk: cold and rainy, with a perpetually gunmetal grey sky. Determined to leave Kabul this time, I set out with Bashir in a dark green suv with questionable brakes, bound for Mazar-e-Sharif. The city, home to several hundred thousand inhabitants, lay eight hours to the north, toward the border with Uzbekistan. The plan was to meet up with workers from the World Food Programme and head farther northwest, to Maimana, in Faryab province.

We passed through only two small towns along the way: Charikar, in Parwan province, right outside Kabul; and, two hours later, Pul-i-Khumri, in Baghlan. The bazaar in Pul-i-Khumri was chockablock with live chickens, shoes and socks, children’s clothes, cheap plastic toys, and fruits and vegetables. It was just after Nowruz, the Persian new year, and Afghans were still in celebration mode. Women in high-heeled shoes and burkas, the bright silk of their shalwars peeking out from underneath, strode along the roadside, kicking up dirt and dragging along children dressed in their Nowruz best.

After Pul-i-Khumri, the sights were only occasional: a shedlike store with crates of bottled water stacked outside, or a young boy waving a green flag to indicate that he was collecting alms for a mosque. More frequent were the small mounds, marked with sticks bearing fluttering green cloths, that showed where a martyr had fallen. In accordance with Islamic tradition, these men had been buried on the spot, anonymously, with no ritual bathing or wrapping. They could have been from recent years or from decades ago; the only certainty was that they had fought and died.

We stayed the night in a guest house in Mazar, and in the morning Bashir dropped me off at the World Food Programme office. The trip from Mazar to Maimana, the capital of Faryab province, was once a bone-cracking seven-hour journey across the Dasht-e-leili desert, but now would take us about three and a half hours along smooth asphalt. The Chinese had built this section of the roughly 3,000-kilometre ring road that connects Afghanistan’s cities, a project conceived during the ’60s but soon abandoned because of fighting. It was resumed in 2001, but eight years, $2.5 billion, and scores of workers’ lives later it remained incomplete, with many sections, especially in the south, in need of constant rebuilding because of bombings or neglect.

Our trip along this intact northern section revealed an Afghanistan much different than the one in and around Kabul. It was a kaleidoscope of emerald fields studded with bright red flowers — gul-e-lalaee, the symbol of Nowruz. Alternating with these pastures were huge tracts of wheat where women toiled in brightly coloured scarves and dresses, and herders grazed camels and long-haired goats.

Soon the weather started to turn, and the crisp, sunny day gave way to cold and rain. We reached Maimana, then set off for the village of Bellar Say in a convoy of three UN trucks, with a police escort to deter kidnappers. Our progress was slow, moving along slippery, often unmarked dirt trails that sometimes narrowed to strips of gravel barely as wide as our truck. The main form of transport in this region is still by donkey.

We eventually stopped on a plateau, where we were greeted by a half-dozen men. I exited the vehicle, and the cold began to cut through my five layers of clothing. Mud seemed to crystallize around my boots. The men, wearing no more than flip-flops or flimsy loafers with no socks, led us up the steep, slick path toward Bellar Say. As we fought for traction, Abdul Hameed, the local wfp staff person, spoke with the villagers and translated their replies. More and more people joined the group, some wanting to voice an opinion, others simply listening.