The Taliban charged us only $1 to get through the first roadblock. At the second, we paid two.

It was highway robbery, but that seemed unimportant. We were traveling in an unarmored Toyota minibus with bald tires and a faded red allah sticker on the back window. The men at the roadblocks had guns, so we gladly would've paid more.

But by the time we reached the next roadblock, the mood on the bus had soured. Everyone was edgy about the possibility of getting kidnapped. We were worn out from several days of hard travel on roads that were little more than cratered, ditch-ridden goat tracks. We were tired of lamb kabob.

At the third roadblock, a pink nylon rope was strung between two wooden posts. We stopped, and a sneering man in his forties with deeply lined brown skin slowly walked up to the vehicle. A younger man with a Kalashnikov sat under a tree by the road while a group of turbaned men stood a short distance away, one holding an automatic rifle and another a cell phone. The man spoke to our driver in Dari, and the driver, young and normally brash, replied quietly. The man turned and looked at us. His eyes were bright and cold and he made our driver nervous. Then he stepped back, untied the pink rope, and let it drop to the ground.

We continued up the road and entered a dusty, ramshackle village called Chisht-e Sharif. A U.S. military helicopter buzzed overhead. Pickup trucks loaded with Afghan National Army soldiers—wearing black masks and carrying weapons—sped down the road, heading in the direction we'd come from.

"You couldn't come to Afghanistan without seeing some Taliban, right?" asked our guide, a seventy-something Englishman named Geoff Hann. He had a ruddy complexion and thick eyebrows, and with a beard and skullcap he could pass for an Afghan. Hann had been leading tours through the country intermittently for more than 30 years, but now even he looked shaken.

I was on "vacation," part of a small tour group whose members had paid Hann, the owner of a UK-based company called Hinterland Travel, $3,700 for the pleasure of traveling in a war zone. His job was to make sure that the people who'd signed up stayed alive while moving through one of the most hazardous countries on earth. Hann operates in safer places, too, but he has a reputation as a specialist who can shepherd adventurous tourists through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan—places that other guides won't touch, no matter how much cash you slap down.

It was August 2010, and it would have been hard to think of a less desirable getaway spot than this Texas-size Central Asian nation. U.S. and NATO forces were engaged in a major offensive to crush a Taliban insurgency entrenched in Afghani­stan's south and east but also blooming in the once peaceful north and west. The month before had been the most deadly for American troops since the Taliban's ouster in 2001 by the U.S. military and its Afghan allies, after several years of brutal fundamentalist rule. Suicide bombings were frequent, armed bandits stalked the country's roads, and kidnapping was now a commercial enterprise. The central government—shakily presided over from Kabul by U.S.-backed president Hamid Karzai—exerted little control outside major cities, and safety anywhere was tenuous at best. The U.S. State Department warned its citizens against traveling to Afghanistan, while the Lonely Planet guide to the country strenuously undersold its attractions. "Hundreds of what are now called 'illegally armed groups' operate freely," it read. "Kidnapping remains a threat.…Criminal groups have been known to sell hostages to the highest bidder, usually the insurgents." Increasingly, NGO workers, journalists, and a trickle of tourists—the only foreigners in the country aside from the military—were confined to cities and usually traveled in armored SUVs with armed guards.