In 2005, Kabul is full of surprises: new walled-off villas with mock-Palladian façades, well-stocked supermarkets, Internet cafés, beauty parlors, restaurants, and stores selling DVDs of Bollywood as well as pornographic films. Sitting in one of Kabul's great traffic jams caused by the Land Cruisers, surrounded by the vivacious banter of Afghanistan's new radio stations and the cries of children hawking newspapers, I often felt as if I was in a small Indian city, among people prospering under the globalized economy.

Quick -- name three well-stocked vivacious films!

But to know, as the days passed and I traveled around Afghanistan, that the new mansions with the architectural adventurousness of Los Angeles belonged to corrupt government officials, often built upon lands stolen from poor Afghans; to learn that the provincial governor, who spoke fluently of "peace," "reconstruction," "international community," and "poppy eradication," was a drug lord; to find out that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which was briefly famous in the West for highlighting the Taliban's harsh treatment of women, was too fearful of radical Islamists to announce its presence in Kabul -- to know this was to begin to have a different sense of the change that had come to Afghanistan in the last three years.

Now -- name three briefly famous radical Islamists!