Convinced the rest of the day would be just as pleasantly quiet, I went to get ready for a TV shoot with a U.S. Army chaplain who gives group guitar lessons on the side – his way of boosting troop morale on base.

And then the day took a violent turn.

The sound of the explosion had that dreaded, deep thud that rocked our house and my spirits.

The blast happened near a hotel in Wazir Akbar Khan district, home to several aid agencies and embassies.

Two bodyguards of former vice-president Ahmad Zia Massoud were among the dead, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said.

The attack took place shortly before President Karzai opened a three-day conference on corruption there, amid pressure from the West to clamp down.

Kabul has been hit by a number of explosions in recent months.
Kabul, Afghanistan map

Last month, a car bomber struck outside a Nato base in Kabul, injuring three foreign soldiers and three Afghan civilians.

Tuesday’s blast is the first such attack since President Karzai was sworn in for a second term in office last month, when he pledged to tackle corruption and insecurity.

Now Afghans are beginning to call their notorious bazaar full of chow and supplies bought or stolen from the vast U.S. military bases by the name of the current American president, a modest counterweight to his Nobel Peace Prize.

“It is Obama Market now,” pronounced Haji Tor, a rotund shopkeeper who acts as kind of an unofficial chamber of commerce president for the market in the Afghan capital. “Bush is finished.”

Well, maybe not quite yet. Most of the shopkeepers and customers still call it the Bush Market, but several said that the new name is gradually gaining traction.

The small market, tucked behind a commercial building in the northwest side of the city, is a U.S. taxpayer’s nightmare.

In front of Tor’s shop was a nearly waist-high, three-deep wall of boxed food that apparently had been destined for military chow halls. There were cases of pre-cooked cheddar gravy sausage biscuits (forbidden to Muslims, who don’t eat pork), and dozens of flats of the Otis Spunkmeyer muffins and white chocolate macadamia cookies that soldiers often get at mealtime.

Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke. He passes the pipe to his wife. She passes it to their daughter. The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby’s tiny mouth. The baby’s eyes roll back into his head.

Their faces are gaunt. Their hair is matted. They smell.

The offensive in the once-forgotten war was launched shortly after 1am on Thursday local time in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold in the southern part of the country and the world’s largest opium poppy producing area.