A Balancing Act

Termez is a frontier town, rough and desolate. It exists for no other reason than it is the end of the road, a former Soviet military outpost on the southern edge of Uzbekistan with a few cotton farms scattered over the surrounding dust-blown desert. When Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989 after a demoralizing 10-year war, the last convoy crossed the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya river less than a kilometer to the south. In a surreal end to a ghastly invasion and failed occupation that cost 15,000 Soviet lives, the bedraggled column left behind the chaos of Afghanistan and...