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From an article in The Guardian..

Fear, disillusion and despair: notes from a divided land as peace slips away.

Six years after the fall of the Taliban, Nato claims the war is being won. But as Peter Beaumont discovered in his journey across the country, the West is in danger of losing the peace as millions suffer the fallout from social and economic collapse.

Afghanistan's problems spring from 'lies and promises that were not kept. There is no security. Everything is in disorder. And the poor are no better off than they were before. They have to take out loans that they cannot return.

In the seventh year after the fall of the first incarnation of the Taliban, two Afghanistans exist. The first is defined by international effort in the country - civil and military - whose story is told in battles won and reconstruction projects brought successfully to fruition. It is largely told through the prism of foreigners, diplomats and soldiers, British, Canadian and American. It emphasises good news, most recently a claim - that would surprise Afghans - that foreign forces were 'routing' the Taliban.

The other Afghanistan is largely ignored. This has 30 million people in whose name the war is being fought. Its themes are disappointment, bitterness and pessimism: a conviction that the vast intervention to rebuild the world's fourth poorest country has benefited only a small handful, and Afghanistan is heading for a new crisis. As even some Western diplomats are beginning to acknowledge, the prevailing fear is that the war is in danger not of being lost or won in Helmand province, but in the perceptions of Afghans.

The problems confronting Afghanistan were brutally summed up in a speech by Nick Grono of the International Crisis Group charity in April. The desire for a 'quick, cheap war' in 2001, he charged, had been followed by a wish for a 'quick, cheap peace'. 'Too often in Afghanistan,' he said, 'when something doesn't go right straight away we say it won't work, or the Afghans won't do it, so we need a new strategy. I'm beginning to lose count of the "last chances".'

It is left to a lorry driver from Lashkar Gah to say: 'There are no jobs.' And he complains that there is too little security despite the British base. 'We are all thinking about who will be the next ruler of Afghanistan. If foreign troops go, the Taliban will come. Then there will be resistance and chaos, like there was before. For now there is no peace, no security, no central government. During the time of the Taliban I was left in peace.

'There is an old Pashto proverb,' he adds ruefully. 'The old thieves were better than the new.'