Down And Dirty

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The soldiers, brave and resourceful though they may be, will be able to do little to head off a looming humanitarian disaster. Afghanistan is one of the poorest, most war-racked and drought-ridden places on earth. So far, humanitarian drops of food by U.S. planes have had little impact on the food shortage. A man from Nangarhar province who arrived in Peshawar last week told doctors that some people in his village were afraid to open the food parcels; during the Soviet war, many Afghans were maimed by toys and packets of cigarettes dropped from planes--and booby-trapped with explosives. Other refugees have been snapping up the rations, but even if everyone were willing to eat them, the roughly quarter-million U.S. food packets dropped last week couldn't begin to blunt the nation's hunger. Though the country's borders are officially closed, refugees are beginning to trickle over the mountains into Quetta and Peshawar.

But the traffic goes both ways. On the road to Kandahar, teenagers from as far away as Karachi are flocking to join the fight against America. "Why do you want to enter this hell?" warned a Taliban soldier at a roadblock. Who knows? Because of religious conviction? Because it's home? Or because, like young men before them for a thousand years, the youths felt, at the prospect of war, a summoning up of the blood. There'll be plenty of that before we're through.

Read Tim McGirk's reports from Pakistan, "Where Osama is a Rock Star," at time.com/mcgirk