Vacuum at the centre

Habib, the labourer, looks at the new mansions in Shirpur and sees injustice. "These people are very bad people. That money was for us and they took it," he said. “The Taleban time was very bad and now it is very bad for the poor. Where is the difference?”

So runs the concluding paragraph of a piece written in November 2006 by Associated Press staff writer Kathy Gannon, published in The Boston Globe and no doubt elsewhere, now archived on an Afghani web site.

And so starts our eleventh - and we hope penultimate - piece on Afghanistan. This one addresses the deficiencies of the Karzai government and the corrosive effects of aid.

Posted on Defence of the Realm