Later, he told me, aid, seed, and fertilizer would be offered to the farmers around Tirin Kot, but not yet.

NEWYORKER: The Taliban��s Opium War

There are small firebases elsewhere in the province, but troops at the main base rarely venture far from Tirin Kot.

NEWYORKER: The Taliban��s Opium War

Almost everything around Tirin Kot is some shade of brown.

NEWYORKER: The Taliban��s Opium War

Someone brought a stretcher, and Wankel, managing a pained smile, was carefully loaded onto it and carried to one of the choppers, which would fly him to the Tirin Kot base.

NEWYORKER: The Taliban��s Opium War

Rockets exploded near the Diablos, and then the choppers disappeared. (They had both been hit several times, but made it back to the base in Tirin Kot, one with a fire on board.) After a few more minutes, the decision was made to retreat.

NEWYORKER: The Taliban��s Opium War

Aside from this jarring image, Tirin Kot is a bucolic-seeming place, a market town of flat-topped adobe houses and little shops on a low bluff on the eastern shore of the Tirinrud River, in a long valley bounded by open desert and jagged, treeless mountains.

NEWYORKER: The Taliban��s Opium War