Geoff Dyer:

Strolling is for tourists and it's exhausting.

Roger Ebert:

Don't you have anything else to do?

Why wait?

Use your card at the CLEARlane to bypass long security waits and be on your way in minutes.

Damon Tabor:

I was on "vacation," part of a small tour group whose members had paid Geoff Hann, the owner of a UK-based company called Hinterland Travel, $3,700 for the pleasure of traveling in a war zone.

There are no backpackers or bus-tour day-trippers in Afghanistan, and proximity to danger is the real essence of a Hann trip. His tour is a chance to court your own demise -- a short walk on the Hindu Kush's dark side. If you were lucky, you would feel more alive at the end. If you weren't? It was best not to think about that.

Andrew Exum:

Everything in Afghanistan is hard, and it is hard all the time.

Ahmed Rashid:

Hamid Karzai is a changed man. His worldview now is decidedly anti-Western. Karzai and the US will not part ways but there is clearly a fundamental and growing tension between them that does not augur well for either the US or Afghanistan.

Anthony Cordesman:

Key elements of the Afghan government have become almost as serious a problem as the Taliban, and it is far from clear that we are fighting the same war.

These are not problems we can afford to keep ignoring.

Philip Gourevitch:

Do doped-up maniacs really go a-maiming in order to increase their country's appeal in the eyes of international aid donors? Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress?

The amputations brought the peace, which brought the UN, which brought the money, which brought the NGOs. All of them wanted a piece of the amputee action. It got to the point where the armless and legless had piles of extra prosthetics in their huts and still went around with their stubs exposed to satisfy the demands of press and NGO photographers, who brought yet more money and more aid.