Afghan opposition fighters, mujahedeen, advanced on Lashkar Gah in the early 1980s, but the city remained under the control of the Soviets and their Afghan allies throughout their nearly decade-long occupation. Fighting in the districts, however, was brutal. Aerial bombing and indiscriminate artillery fire flattened villages and destroyed irrigation canals. Soviet and government troops were accused of mass rape and massacres that wiped out whole villages. To wear down opposition factions, the Soviets deliberately exacerbated intertribal conflicts, ensuring the province’s slide into civil war after their departure, in 1989. It was during this lawless time that the Bost Hotel suffered its worst damage to date. Without a functioning state to contain it, fighting between factions went unhindered in Lashkar Gah, and much of the hotel’s riverfront facade was destroyed, the bricks from its three-foot-thick walls cascading down the steep bank and into the river. The building was abandoned, and its contents were looted. The Bost Hotel, like the city it was named after, was left in ruins.

After 15 years of war, with the population tired of the criminal rackets and warlords fighting for power in the wake of their jihad, a new force with a reputation for high virtue swept through the south from neighboring Kandahar: The Taliban took control of Lashkar Gah in 1994 with barely a bullet fired. Soon, mujahedeen commanders were disarmed, and violence was almost eradicated. For regular Helmandis, the Taliban’s harshness — rule based on fear and zero tolerance for crime — was a small price to pay for stability. In fact, there were few Taliban fighters in Helmand at all. With little opposition to their rule in the south, the majority were sent to fight the Northern Alliance. In Lashkar Gah, the handful of brick government buildings, including the Bost Hotel, were quickly occupied. After the damage was repaired, the hotel became a place for Taliban commanders and their fighters to convalesce away from the battlefield.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. After Al Qaeda’s attack, the United States led an invasion of Afghanistan. It began on Oct. 7; 12 weeks later, on the last day of 2001, a Special Forces team entered Lashkar Gah. They found the Bost Hotel abandoned and took up residence, building sandbag machine-gun positions on the flat roof.

Most Taliban in Helmand stowed their weapons and returned to agrarian village life; others allied themselves with the new administration in Lashkar Gah. American Special Forces teams worked with local militias, scouring the districts for remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. They killed or captured scores who were neither, but were simply rivals of the Helmandi commanders they had chosen to work with. Some Taliban, fearing capture and extradition to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or worse, may have disappeared across the border into Pakistan. For a few years, with the Americans operating mostly in rural Helmand, and local tribal elites running the province with Kabul’s blessing, Lashkar Gah maintained an uneasy peace.

In 2002, one such tribal leader, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, settled in as the new provincial governor and opened up his office in a compound next door to the Bost. One of his staff members, Jan Mohammad, had worked at the hotel during the tumultuous years that followed the Soviet departure, before the Taliban took over. He and other staff members cleared the Special Forces’ fortifications from the roof; repainted the interior; laid new carpet; hung heavy, pencil-pleat curtains across the windows; and opened for business. The governor charged $50 per person per night. Jan Mohammad is still there, booking guests into the hotel today.