By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 17, 2004

NAW ZAD

There was no road, just a barely decipherable pattern of tire tracks across the desert. But we kept our eyes on the low mountain ridge ahead, and finally the trail narrowed to a single stony path into town -- a dry riverbed, invitingly bordered by fields of emerald shoots and delicate blossoming trees.

We had traveled 12 hours from Kabul to this remote farming town of several thousand people in the southern province of Helmand, a translator and driver and myself, trying to track down a teenager from a mountain village who had recently been released from the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

The youth's odyssey was our immediate interest, an exotic tale that promised dramatic insights into a secretive facility thousands of miles away, while the setting for our quest seemed merely grim: a muddy community without telephones or toilets or reading light or eating utensils.