Later we were back in Kabul, and Rumsfeld’s motorcade spent some time going back and forth in the city. I’m not going to pretend to tell you anything important from what I saw going through Kabul in a van, but here are some impressions. It’s gut-wrenchingly poor, as you would expect. Lots of abandoned and twisted steel sitting around. Lots of shanties. Lots of very beaten-up concrete buildings. Rumsfeld says he sees more energy on the streets every time he is here. It still looks pretty bleak. Although on the main road to the airport—”The Great Masood Road” they call it, or something like that—you see splashes of color and rows of shops. One said, “Ice Crim-Barger”—maybe an ice cream and burger joint? I don’t know. I counted three boys flying kites. Many women are still in blue burkas. But then you see some women just in scarfs who have taken some care in their dress and I think would qualify as decked out by any reasonable standard. And some carried brightly-colored parasols against the sun. I tried to read the mood of people as we went by. Mostly they just watched impassively. At one point I thought a boy was making a gun-pointing gesture at us, but I’m pretty sure he was actually making an emphatic double thumbs-up.