It is the Kabul Golf Course, Afghanistan's only one, and Mohammad Afzal Abdul, who picked up a putter for the first time when he was 10, is its director and golf pro. The nine-hole course is extraordinarily rugged by any standard. It has no grass and no delineation between the fairways and the rough, and the greens -- the course rules call them browns -- are a concoction of sand and oil packed with a heavy roller and swept with a broom vaguely resembling those dragged along the base paths at the seventh-inning stretch in baseball. In 2003, after American bombers had driven the Taliban from power, he returned to his beloved course. Abandoned tanks and heavy weapons were scattered around the valley, which was pocked with mortar craters and denuded of trees and grass. The clubhouse was pitted with shrapnel and bullet holes.
