Price Of A Deal
Musharraf may have bent backwards in a bid to make his country the standard bearer of the US in the region. Of course, there are financial rewards for Pakistan, but the fear of a fundamentalist backlash continues to keep the nation on tenterhooks.

Circle Of Death
Violence fuelled by bigotry and foreign money brought the Taliban to power. Now as things come full circle the Islamic militia may meet an equally brutal end.

Afghanistan 1978-2001
Its women once enjoyed social freedom, and there was joy and peace. It is now a country perverted by the missionaries of a grim utopia. A social history in pictures.

COVERSTORY: IMAGES

Afghanistan 1978-2001

A portrait of a country devastated by war and perverted by the missionaries of a grim utopia. Yet, this was once a beautiful land where normal people lived normal lives.

—Swapan Dasgupta

There are times civilisations regress. In the Great Game of the 19th century, Britain and Russia waged a proxy war in Afghanistan for that most enticing prize-India. When Soviet troops marched into Kabul in the winter of 1979 and triggered a similar conflict with its American superpower rival, there was no worthwhile objective. Afghanistan became the theatre of war for its own sake.

The consequences were devastating. The burden of an impossible war helped destroy the Soviet Union completely. The American victors gloating in the sunshine of President Ronald Reagan's triumphalism just moved on. Afghanistan fell off the world map, abandoned to its own tears. Once Khalq fought Parcham, then Hekmatyar battled Masood and the Northern Alliance confronted the Taliban-were the battles worth it?

Two million people died in the past two decades and more than this number became statistics in the books of the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees.

Until Osama bin Laden became the new millennium's answer to Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, Afghanistan had even ceased to be regarded as an ethnographic distraction. Reduced to guns and rubble, it exiled itself from civilised society. It became the laboratory of grim zealots with a fierce commitment to a medieval utopia-a world without music, laughter and beauty. The Taliban is the abnormal offshoot of a country made abnormal by very normal people.

This is a war against terror. It is also a war to restore dignity to Afghanistan-a land that has nothing else left to fight for.

The Last House In Herat Afghanistan is one place that can't be bombed to the Stone Age-there is nothing left to destroy. For this refugee family, shelter comes courtesy the ruins of an earlier civilisation (left). Whatever remained, like the deserted US Embassy, fell victim to the vandalism of the Taliban (right).

Living By The Gun-Permanently Guns and Afghanistan have been inseparable. Since 1979, however, it has been a state at permanent war. The Soviet occupation-which put Afghanistan at the centre of superpower conflict-ended ignominiously in 1989 (left). It was followed by a vicious civil war that left Kabul's landmarks like the Darul Aman palace scarred (right).

MetroScape

Fort Of Arms
In the 16th century, a Portuguese governor fortified a strategically located house to defend ships in the harbour of an island on the west coast of India acquired from the Sultan of Gujarat. Mumbai grew first into a fort and then into a city from here.
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Looking Glass

Delhi Photography:
Pradeep Bhatia

Delhi Music Concert: Pandit Ram Chatur Mallick Dhrupad Foundation

Delhi Sculpture: Sculpter Hemi Bawa