Rock and Hard Places Read Online Free PDF

for some time, and I am yet to read a report describing the place as the Vermont of central Asia. I nevertheless believe the ongoing war there to be an effort worth making. Aside from considerations pertaining to self-interest—allowing Afghanistan to fester as a failed state worked out pretty badly for the rest of the world—it strikes me as a supremely elegant match of supply and demand. On one side, fervid holy warriors who declare that their dearest wish is a martyr’s deathfighting the infidel. On the other, the awesome military forces of NATO and its allies. An offensive named “Operation Form An Orderly Queue, Weirdbeards” is surely overdue.
    Finally, I apologise to American readers for the cricketing references in the opening paragraph, but that’s what you get for disdaining this supremely noble sport in favour of the boorish playground pastime of baseball, and
as further punishment you may strap yourselves in for the following. A few months after the reported conversation took place, the player at the centre of it stepped into cricketing legend just over the other side of the Khyber Pass. In October 2008, while captaining Australia in a Test match against Pakistan at Peshawar’s Arbab Niaz Stadium, Mark Taylor piled up a colossal innings of 334 not out, equalling what was then the Australian record for runs scored by an individual batsman in a Test match, set sixty-eight years earlier by Sir Donald Bradman. I remember reading of Taylor’s triple century at the time, and hoping that the officer who’d been so excited to meet someone who shared Taylor’s birthplace had been able to get leave to see at least some of Taylor’s epic knock. Even if Mark Taylor was-it turned out, upon further investigation-actually born in Leeton, a bit to the northwest of Wagga Wagga, just past Narrandera.

    “MARK TAYLOR,” SAYS the young Wing Commander of the Pakistan Army’s Khyber Rifles, “is a very good batsman.”
    We’re outside in the stifling heat, incessant noise and choking dust of the border crossing at Torkham. He’s examining my passport, making sure my visa entitles me to come back into Pakistan at some stage. I’m kind of concerned on this point myself.
    “You were born in Wagga Wagga,” he continues. “Like Mark Taylor. Very, very good batsman.”
    Behind me are the CARE Afghanistan truck and driver that have borne me along the vertiginous Khyber Pass road from Peshawar, along with the armed military guard that any foreigners silly enough to travel the intermittently bandit-prone route must be accompanied by.
    “Very good batsman.”
    Well, I don’t know, I tell him. Without wishing to cast aspersions at Australia’s redoubtable captain, or his efficiency as an opener, I’ve always found him a bit prosaic, as a spectacle. Certainly no Dean Jones.
    “No. Very good batsman.” He emphasises the “Very” with a fervour that suggests further disagreement would be foolish.
    The border crossing point is an open gate between two white
turrets that would be more appropriate to a mediaeval theme park. Between them, unchecked traffic teems in both directions: battered cars and gaudily decorated trucks; camels and mules; people toting sacks, suitcases and wheelbarrows; lone, swaggering turbaned Afghans slinging rifles; shoals of Pakistani traders in various shades of pyjama suit; women blundering about under veils, trying uselessly to control squawking flocks of children, chasing and scrapping in the dirt. On the fence next to the gate, six Japanese tourists perch and chatter like mutant galahs, and fire their cameras into Afghanistan.
    “But,” the Wing Commander concedes, “he has been having a bad patch lately. Please enjoy Afghanistan.”
    This conversation is the least peculiar thing that will happen to me for a week.
     
    ACROSS THE BORDER, I change some US dollars for Afghanis, the local currency. The Afghani is not one of the greats—children in low-slung hessian tents by the roadside sell it