So far most Kabulis continue about their business, assured that their chances of being killed in this war are still low. On a day-to-day basis, their worries are more about poverty and the predation of public officials.

The government of Afghanistan under President Hamid Karzai has become a classic rentier state: an institution designed to capture revenue rather than deliver services and facilitate economic growth. Instead of oil, it feeds on the free flow of international aid, which accounts for 92 percent of the nation's income. The government's thirty-two ministries are massively overstaffed, with employees usually earning a mere $30-$100 a month. They sit in squalid offices drinking tea, reading newspapers and watching Bollywood films on TV.

Not surprisingly, they use their positions to demand bribes and peculate public funds. The modus operandi of the ministries is to deny access, deny permission, deny responsibility and sabotage those who might be effective at their job--in case they start capturing more of the aid flow.

This mess is largely the result of a US-led process that--in the lead-up to the Iraq War--sloppily fast-tracked Afghanistan's reconstruction. Warlords were allowed to control the government and the United States signed off on ridiculous shakedown schemes like paying wages to militia commanders who wildly exaggerated their troop numbers. The result is a nonfunctional state that will probably never be able to "stand up" and allow the international community to successfully "stand down."

Five years after the overthrow of the Taliban, Kabul has only three hours of electricity per day and unsanitary and inadequate drinking water. The healthcare system is nonexistent or run by foreign NGOs, and primary schools lack teachers. The government undertakes almost no public works; there is no food-safety system or program of agricultural extensions; state-owned industries--such as coal mines, gas works, cement factories, the national airline with its half-dozen planes, a chain of old hotels and several massive granaries--receive little or no investment.

To pay taxes in Kabul one must first bribe the tax collector! No bribe and your taxes (which will be stolen) won't be registered as paid. Without proof of payment a homeowner or shopkeeper could be reported to the police, arrested and repeatedly extorted at every step of the legal process.

Even government offices bribe one another. "To get license plates for our cars we had to bribe the Transportation Ministry," says Naqib, who runs nebulously defined "capacity-building workshops" at the Ministry of Women's Affairs. "We had to pay about $2,000."

Women working in government offices--beyond the control of their husbands but still crushed by poverty--often double and triple their paltry $30 a month salaries through casual prostitution. "Cellphones make it very easy," says an Afghan driver. "The woman I am seeing has just two or three friends. I pay her a month's salary for an hour in the back room of my friend's store."

"Closing the Chinese brothels was a joke," says a friend of mine who contracts for a major Western intelligence service and has access to the highest levels of government in Kabul. "The palace is the biggest brothel of all--half the female screeners in the presidential guard engage in prostitution."

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