Matthew Green reports for the Financial Times.
Each morning this winter, Haji Abdul Jabar has packed a flask of home-brewed green tea for work. It's not frugality; he's trying to avoid being poisoned. You can't be too careful: before leaving the house, he also straps a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun into a holster secreted in the depths of his robes. Seized with occasional fits of passion, Jabar has been known to whip out the gun during meetings. He may be jumpy, but tactics like this are not entirely out of place in his line of work: as district governor, the 65-year-old has an unenviable task – of wresting the Arghandab River Valley, one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan, from the Taliban.
Viewed from the roof of Jabar's district headquarters, the sweep of the valley is at once beautiful – bleakly majestic – and charged with menace. A distant range of low, dun-coloured hills defines the valley's opposite flank. Orchards of pomegranate trees, their branches stripped bare by the cold, line the banks of a river meandering across the valley floor, dividing the east side of Arghandab from the west.
Continues at: ft.com - US civilians battle to help Afghanistan