Each morning this winter, Haji Abdul Jabar has packed a flask of home-brewed green tea for work. It\u2019s not frugality; he\u2019s trying to avoid being poisoned. You can\u2019t be too careful: before leaving the house, he also straps a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun into a holster secreted in the depths of his robes. Seized with occasional fits of passion, Jabar has been known to whip out the gun during meetings. Tactics like this are not entirely out of place in his line of work: as district governor, the 65-year-old has an unenviable task \u2013 of wresting the Arghandab River Valley, one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan, from the Taliban.<\/p>\n
Viewed from the roof of Jabar\u2019s district headquarters, the sweep of the valley is at once beautiful \u2013 bleakly majestic \u2013 and charged with menace. A distant range of low, dun-coloured hills defines the valley\u2019s opposite flank.<\/p>\n
Orchards of pomegranate trees, their branches stripped bare by the cold, line the banks of a river meandering across the valley floor, dividing the east side of Arghandab from the west.<\/p>\n
The east is where Jabar\u2019s office is perched, and where US troops feel safer \u2013 it\u2019s the west side they call \u201cbad juju land\u201d. Insurgents use a strip of desert there to infiltrate Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban in the mid-1990s, and the pivot on which previous Afghan wars have turned.<\/p>\n
Roadside bombs hidden in the lush vineyards last year turned Arghandab into a killing field. A battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division deployed here in mid-December is hoping for better luck but a new showdown is coming. Stanley McChrystal, the Nato commander in Afghanistan, has vowed to secure Kandahar. The Taliban want it back.<\/p>\n
One night, one of the insurgents called the governor\u2019s mobile. \u201cHe said, \u2018I\u2019m going to kill you, you\u2019re working for the Americans,\u2019\u201d says Jabar, sitting on the carpet in his office. \u201cI said, \u2018Do whatever you can do.\u2019 Then I abused him and hung up.\u201d Jabar normally cuts a rather solemn figure. At this recollection, he laughed.
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