You know how it is.

You can’t run off to every bombing even with a presidential election just days away.

When I started here in 2001, I could chase them down because traffic didn’t exist, and there wasn’t a police force to seal off the area. I could walk through debris and bodies without question and watch other reporters pose in the shattered remains of cars as colleagues snapped their pictures.

Today, Kabul is a chaotic city of three million mostly impoverished people, but it only has enough housing and roads for half that number. With so much congestion, what was once a thirty-minute drive can now take as long as two hours. By the time you arrive, the fledgling Afghan police force and US military and international security forces will have sealed off the area so tightly that all you will see is yellow tape, maybe a charred car, and some dazed people who don’t know much other than that one minute they were walking and in the next the air heaved and tore at their bodies and then threw them to the ground.

No, the place to go is Akbar Khan Hospital, where the injured are taken. There, in an effort to rally international support against the Taliban insurgency, doctors will allow you to walk among the maimed and injured and snap photos and take notes and then leave. The people you see will be one more example of a tottering government that can no longer provide security as it engages in a presidential election that is just so much background noise to the real noise of bombs going off. In time, all this won’t bother you like it used to. No shock, no despair, nothing. Only fear. Sometimes fear can lift the coma.

So I sit this morning in a hotel lobby drinking lukewarm Nescafé with a Dutch news photographer and watching the BBC when another bomb explodes. I feel it more than hear it. That little ripple beneath the floor, the air vibrating as the walls absorb the wave of a far-off blast that somehow has reached us. We both stand and look out a window but see nothing other than a few frantic policemen pointing and shouting in opposite directions and looking into the sky.

We sit back down. By now, we know the drill. I check my watch. In an hour, we’ll head to the hospital. The photographer nods in agreement.

“You know what, mate?” he says. “If we don’t care, nobody cares.”

Mohammad Heider stands outside Akbar Khan Hospital. Both his calves and both his hands are wrapped in bandages. Small scratches scar his bearded face. Beside him on the cracked steps, a man sits in a wheelchair, his left foot wrapped in a cast and thrust straight out into the air like a thick tree limb. Blood stains the heel of his cast and drips onto the damp pavement. Women wail at the bottom of the steps leading into the hospital. On blankets, men sip tea and wait for word of a family member injured in the bombing.

A taxi pulls up and three men struggle to lift the man from his wheelchair into the back seat. Once they get him inside, the women seat themselves in the open bed of the truck while the three men squeeze into the cab beside the injured man.

Heider watches the cab leave and waits for his own family to pick him up. This day, August 15, he was walking close to the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) when a sudden shock wave tossed him toward the sky. He landed on his left side and thought, I can’t move. Shards of glass rained hard on the pavement. His ears buzzed. When he opened his eyes, people, chiseled with cuts, lay all around him. His feet bled. He crawled over glass to a doorway. A man picked him up and carried him to a car. The sound still roared in his ears. Three other bleeding people sat slumped to one side in the backseat. All the roads were blocked and, despite his bleeding passengers, the driver had to show his identification to dozens of panicked police to get through the checkpoints.

At the hospital, the doctor worked very fast. He washed Heider’s legs and hands, bandaged them and told him to come back in three days to have shrapnel removed. He had to walk out on his own and borrowed another patient’s mobile phone to call his son. Three hours after the explosion he stands here still waiting for his ride. He feels better, but the pain in his feet racks his body with tremors.

He looks at his hands, blood already staining the fresh bandages. The doctor told him to change these dressings daily. He wonders where he will get the money for new bandages. Can I give it to him?

Until now, he had not decided whether or not he would vote in the presidential election. Now he knows: He will not. It will hurt too much to walk to the polling station near his home. Why put himself through that for corrupt men? If you don’t take a bribe as a government official, Karzai won’t give you anything. You must be dishonest. No matter who wins. That’s how it is. Nothing changes, he says—except his life will never be the same after today.

Driving back to the hotel, my interpreter jokes with other Afghans stuck in traffic about the campaign billboards scattered throughout Kabul. They compose slogans to go with the posed candidates.

For Karzai, the favored candidate, shaking his fist: Vote for Me, or I Will Box You.

For smiling Abdullah Abdullah: Vote for Me, My Taliban Brothers, and You Can Keep the South.

For bald Ashraf Ghani, running a distant third: Vote for Me, So I Can Afford a Hat to Cover My Head.

Karzai is the butt of the most jokes. My translator especially enjoys the story about tribal leaders in a rural province who were tired of all the corruption. A small group of them journeyed to Kabul and requested a meeting with Karzai. He gave them five minutes.

“Mr. President,” the lead elder pleaded, “you must stop all the corruption in our province.”

“I will be happy to,” Karzai told them. “But first how much will you pay me?”