Letter from Kandahar: Kite Flying and Bomb Ducking

Shortly after lunch on a bright, cool day last week, I paid a local cabbie to take me to a Taliban military station and ammunition dump on the outskirts of Kandahar, the spiritual capital of the Taliban movement and, until the U.S. bombings began, the headquarters of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Midway there, we heard a series of small explosions followed by three or four loud blasts. A few thousand meters to our left, on the edges of the cantonment, the ground was spitting up dust and smoke, clouding the air.

I asked the driver to...