A boy carries bread in Kabul.
Photograph: Manish Swarup/APYou view Kabul differently if you were there before the fall of the Taliban. If it's your first trip to the city, then it looks pretty dismal, despite the pure aesthetics of the hills, the snow and the sky.
Rubbish in the streets, hideous traffic, desperately poor beggars, erratic electricity, meat hanging on hooks outside the butchers' for want of refrigeration, one-legged mine victims hobbling along potholed roads, entire families piled into one- or two-roomed mud-walled homes without proper sanitation and without proper food either.
But if you were in Kabul under the Taliban, you have different eyes. All the above existed then - except the traffic - but much has changed. So I drive past the Olympic stadium and remember the two executions I saw there.
Now the stadium is empty. I walk down Jaid-e-Maiwand, a main thoroughfare, and think of the expanse of rubble that it once was. Now it is a bustling bazaar and main road. The grim misery that was Kabul in the 90s has gone.
The problem is that in the capital - as elsewhere - there are huge disparities in terms of development.
There is a brash nouveau-riche middle class, for example. When I ask an Afghan friend where such people go shopping, he answers: "Dubai."
The differences nationwide are vast, too. Towns to the north of Kabul like Pul-e-Khumri are now secure and relatively prosperous. The Shomali plains are transformed, too. Once, six or seven years ago, I sat with fighters of the Northern Alliance watching shelling across mined and devastated villages and orchards. Now the farmers have returned to their homes and the fruitbasket of Afghanistan is coming back to life.
But then, away from the main roads, in the rural areas, there is dire poverty that is a disgrace to the international community. Much of the aid money channelled to Afghanistan has been misspent. Local government is corrupt and often the Taliban are the "least worst" option in terms of providing security. It is not quite fair to call President Hamid Karzai, "the mayor of Kabul", but central government does not have much influence beyond the capital and regional centres of population.
One interesting anecdote may indicate that some things in some areas are going in the right direction - or perhaps are not. On Jaid-e-Maiwand I spoke to a contractor from the eastern Paktia province, usually seen as a hotbed of warlordism. I asked him how security was in his hometown. "Not bad," he answered. Who is the local commander, I asked.
Previously, this was a standard inquiry as it was always the local warlord who was seen as the biggest power in any given location. However, the contractor, a craggy-faced elder with a henna-died beard and a superb turban, looked perplexed.
Then he gave me the name of the local police chief. Did he mean that the police chief was a warlord? Or that the police actually have some degree of authority where he lived? Difficult to say. What is clear however is that things, for good or ill, are changing in Afghanistan.
The real question is whether the coalition and the central government, having in 2002 missed the fantastic opportunity to better the lives of 20 million people and make themselves more secure into the bargain, are going to be able to make up for lost time.
As we wait for the spring offensive - whether that of Nato or of the Taliban - the jury is still out.
This is the latest post by Observer correspondent Jason Burke, who is with the British Army in Afghanistan. Read part one here and part two here.
