It's morning in Kabul. Cold and crisp under sunny skies, and on the street corners, radios blare from the shops, every few minutes reporting the latest returns from the U.S. elections. I'm here watching widescreen television in the movie room of the Hare and Hounds, a pub in the cellar of the Gandamack Lodge, a completely weird club here in Kabul. It's like one of those colonial clubs from the days of the Raj, up in the Simla Hills. The place is packed with Americans, drinking coffee and kibitzing, and the mood is wild. . .

Minutes to go!! . . .

. . . Everybody's screaming and cheering. Wolf Blitzer just said something cheery on the television. CNN's declared Obama, it seems, but from where I'm sitting - under a display case of old Lee Enfield rifles and Bren guns - it's hard to say.

No. It's not hard to say. They're all Democrats in this room, and they're going wild. My ears hurt. . . .

. . . "Oh my God! I can't tell you. . . what can I say? I am so thrilled," says Susan Marx, the tireless campaigner for Americans for Obama, here in Kabul. She's in tears. Everybody's hugging everybody.

It's dark and loud in this cavernous place, where you check your Glock on the way in, and if there are Republicans here, they must be happy too, because I haven't seen anyone since I arrived who isn't smiling.

"I haven't been so thrilled, so happy, since the election of Nelson Mandela," said the South African - born Marx. "I'm just so thrilled."

Terry Glavin, a Tyee columnist and widely published B.C. journalist, is in Afghanistan on a reporting assignment.