Fly Fishing in Afghanistan: 'Fishing is the opposite of war'

This is a reporter's memoir of his quest for trout in the mountain streams of Afghanistan at the height of the war waged against the Taliban by the United States and its NATO allies. The former Kabul bureau chief for the international news agency AFP offers an intriguing glimpse of life behind the bloody headlines in a country of spectacular beauty and tumultuous history. Armed only with a lifelong love of fishing and a belief that Italian explorer Marco Polo encountered trout in his travels through Afghanistan centuries earlier, he packs his fly-rod whenever he gets the chance to leave the busy but cheerful bureau. His search takes him from the Panjshir valley in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, the graveyard of Soviet tanks in an earlier war, to Bamiyan, notorious for the Taliban's destruction of ancient Buddha statues carved into the cliffs. George Orwell wrote in Coming up for Air that "fishing is the opposite of war". The writer says he likes the phrase "but it seemed to me there were similarities between the suddenness of a strike from a fish and an explosion on a quiet day in the office. Both flicked life's intensity switch from low to high".
The 6,000 word essay includes a tribute to a much-loved colleague, Sardar Ahmad, who was killed by the Taliban along with most of his family. It is beautifully illustrated with pictures by another colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winner Massoud Hossaini, and Daud Yardost.