PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — For the cool price of $555, Lan Kosal will escort a client to a remote location in the Cambodian countryside to blow up a cow with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a grizzly form of entertainment popular among some backpackers visiting this poor Southeast Asian nation. The use of the Soviet-era launcher and its artillery is the relatively inexpensive part of the package, said Lan. “The real cost is the cow. You have to buy it before we let you kill it,” he explained matter-of-factly. Many tourists, he noted, aren’t interested in firing bazookas at bovines or [...]
Our destination is on a high plain some 120 kilometers south of Kabul: a barren area that the native population calls simply “Dasht”: desert. About ten minutes earlier we turned off the main road and now we are advancing with difficulty over sand and gravel. It is a bright, beautiful day. The sunlight is like mica glistening out of a steely blue sky. The car must be somewhere out in front of us: a white Toyota Corolla that is supposed to take us to our scheduled meeting. Our investigations are almost completed. We have been waiting for days for this [...]
“Osama bin Laden Captured” is a headline that wasn’t written in 2006: the same with “Zawahiri Caught,” a reference to al-Qaida’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. A year is the sum total of its failures, as well as its successes; and before going too far into January, it might be sobering to take a quick backward glance at what didn’t happen last year. Iraq, of course, offers dozens of unfulfilled hopes and expectations. The Bush administration likes to boast of its role in bringing free elections to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. But free elections, it turns out, don’t guarantee democracy. To get [...]
