Scott Taylor in the Chronicle Herald

I wasn't all that engrossed in the rest of Scott Taylor's article, but the opening paragraphs were awfully interesting.

To wit:

DURING MY LAST unembedded tour in Afghanistan, I teamed up with Australian war correspondent Sasha Uzunov. Like me, Uzunov is a former soldier, and when necessary we would carry weapons for self-defence.
When operating in the volatile Kandahar region, the two of us "horajees" (foreigners), even armed with Kalashnikovs, would have been easy prey for the Taliban or criminal hostage-takers. As such, we employed a small group of Afghan security guards.
The leader of this contingent was a huge, fiercely bearded Pashtun whom we jokingly dubbed Chew Bacca due to his uncanny resemblance to the Star Wars wookie. In his workmanlike English, "Chewy" also acted as our tour guide for the Kandahar district. He would proudly point to a muddy canal and proclaim with a toothy grin, "This is the Arghandab River."
To Uzunov and me, it appeared to be a virtually dried-up irrigation ditch, but to Chewy, it was on par with the mighty Nile.
Dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, Chewy advised us that he knew why the world has come to Kandahar.
"It is because this region is so fertile," he said. Sweeping his arm to indicate a smattering of freshly planted fields, he asked, "Have you ever seen such a fertile place?"
We didn’t have the heart to tell him that his homeland is one of the most desolate and arid regions on the planet that is still considered habitable. Anyone in Canada who has seen the images in the newspaper or watched the videos on the nightly newscasts would be hard pressed to call the Afghan landscape "lush."
We realized that Chewy was illiterate and had no access to the Internet, and the only world he knew was the infertile area around Kandahar and the even more desolate desert that surrounds it.
Chewy had no idea that inside the NATO airfield, the assembled foreign soldiers have access to three massive mess halls serving four meals a day, and fast-food outlets that include Burger King, Pizza Hut and Tim Hortons — complete with Timbits and iced cappuccinos.
In Chewy’s opinion, all these troops and all their technology had descended on his home province to secure the dried apricot harvest of Kandahar.