THE LION’S GRAVE

Intense, immediate reporting from the front lines in Afghanistan.

Seized, as soon as the destruction of September 11 became known, with the idea of filing from Afghanistan, New Yorker correspondent Anderson found he needed to bring all of his experience into play just to get into the country. (“One can always find a way to get smuggled in,” he assured his editor, Sharon DeLano, by e-mail on September 12th.) He made it about two weeks later and began sending reports on the lay of the land, the combatants, and the state of affairs among civilians. Here, he presents those pieces, written over the next eight months, in conjunction with his e-mail correspondence with DeLano. The essays (most previously published in the New Yorker) offer snapshots of the war’s progress as Anderson chews over the progression of events with local Northern Alliance leaders, pokes around an abandoned bin Laden compound, interviews the occasional Afghan woman who will risk being seen with him, ferrets out the origin of the rumors of poisoned humanitarian aid rations (some Afghans had eaten the preservative drying agents that keep the food fresh), and casts an eye over Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. His e-mail traces how he got these stories. The result is a sort of war-watcher’s travelogue, letting us in on the vicissitudes that dictate where our man winds up: the difficulties of getting visas, or even moving from one town to another along bandit-controlled byways; the free-wheeling insults traded between reporters and cranky, gun-wielding fighters; the kluges necessitated by meeting deadlines in a pre-industrial landscape; and the love inspired by a fully functional Toughbook computer and Inmarsat satellite phone.

An important and eminently readable account from the heart of chaos.