AFGHANISTAN: Chris Stephen returned recently to the Afghan capital of Kabul to see what had changed since the war against the Taliban, and what had not
Afghan mothers don't invoke the big bad wolf to get their children to behave in Kabul. They say "Gulbuddin". That always does the trick.
The driver of the yellow and white taxi mutters the same thing as he skirts the potholes in what was once the main highway down to the royal palace at Darulaman. As he does so, he points left and right, to the mud-coloured ruins that stretch for miles in every direction. "Gulbuddin, Gulbuddin."
Gulbuddin is the first name of Afghanistan's most notorious warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose troops, supplied by an infinite number of long-range rockets by the Russians, devastated huge tracts of Kabul.
In fact, just over half the city lies in ruins, a huge smashed wasteland that ends in the once beautiful royal palace at Darulaman, only barely recognisable from the lush seat of the country's newly returned king, Zahir Shah.
Hekmatyar did all this out of spite, having been ejected by his former mujahedeen allies from Kabul after they invaded it following the retreat of Soviet forces in 1992, firing thousands of huge rockets into the capital over a period of two years.
The mujahedeen beat the Soviets but the Taliban beat the mujahedeen, sending Hekmatyar into exile. But now that the Americans have beaten the Taliban, Hekmatyar is back. Not in the deserted old farm complex that was once, assures my driver, home to his huge extended family on the city outskirts, but out there somewhere in the great empty spaces of Afghanistan beyond the cordon of UN forces. Moving and plotting, financed by his backers in neighbouring Iran, ready to rain death once more on this land.
"It was not just Gulbuddin," mutters my translater, starting a quick argument with the driver. "All this and this and this and this," he says with a despairing gesture at buildings so riddled with bullet holes it looks like pebble dashing. "Not just Gulbuddin."
In fact, the name Gulbuddin is shorthand in Kabul for "warlord", and it is a term used more and more because, one year on from September 11th, Kabul has got the jitters. The early optimism that greeted the arrival of American forces and UN money has given way to anxiety.
The car-bombs are to blame. No one knows who sets them off - or rather, the list of suspects is too long for anyone to make even a guess as to the culprit.
Too many warlords got rich during 23 years of warfare in Afghanistan, and too many fear that a genuine return to democratic rule and something approaching normality will mean their gangster days are numbered.
Partly this is the fault of the US. Last year's invasion broke the Taliban, and the al-Qaeda bases on its territory. But the Americans also produced a serious problem which cannot be masked despite all the rosy pronouncements about the coming of democracy.
The forces that "liberated" Kabul last November, breaking the Taliban regime, came from one small group, the Tajiks. Nice enough people, and among the most successful of the country's merchant class, they are nevertheless a minority. But because Tajik troops - the backbone of the Northern Alliance - now occupy Kabul (many dressed as police officers) the Tajiks are in command.
The US may have got its own man, Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, as President, but the real power rests with the Tajiks who hold the defence, police and foreign ministries in the palm of their hand.
For now the Pashtuns, who formed the Taliban, are confused and at war with each other, but soon they will unite, demanding along with Afghanistan's Hazaras, Uzbeks and nomads that they too get a slice of the pie.
Karzai is a rare gift - a man with a Nelson Mandela charity to his being, a man who understands that the Pashtuns, although the largest group, cannot be allowed to rule the roost on their own.
But Karzai aside, Afghanistan's rulers are an uninspiring crowd. In the north, Tajik chieftains are at war with the hulking Uzbek warlord, Rashid Dostum, for control of the strategically vital Mazar-e-Sherif.
In the east, central government has been squashed by the Iranian-backed warlord Ismail Khan; although, interestingly enough, his rule of the beautiful eastern city of Heart is popular. Women are back at university, and there is order on the streets.
To the south another kind of economic redevelopment has seen money flood in. The poppy fields, ripped up by the fundamentalist Taliban, are back in cultivation north of Kandahar, and money is starting to roll in as the first opium crop reaches western Europe.
And in fact, amid the squabbling of the warlords, there are grounds for hope. For the moment, Afghanistan's neighbours are behaving themselves, with Iran, Tajikistan and Pakistan all resisting the temptation to pump in arms to their favoured warlords.
"Afghanistan has no arms industry," says a nurse at Kabul women's hospital, now thriving after being starved of resources by the Taliban. "If you do not give to the warlords, they have nothing to shoot with." Markets are open, small businesses are starting up and there are grants from the World Bank to kick-start the economy in a country which has no industry or infrastructure.
Just as important, for the task of persuading foreign business to invest, is that for all the talk of car-bombs and assassinations, Kabul is a friendly place.
The police in their olive-drab uniforms are more likely to want their photo taken by you than to demand your papers. On the main highway out of town are rows of shops selling pots and pans, exhaust pipes and radios made in the 1960s and left behind by wandering hippies.
"Taliban go, we can make money," says one smiling bearded trader.
Socially, the women of Kabul have begun to experiment with wandering around without the burqa, though in the provinces any kind of equality with men is forbidden.
Unusually, the United Nations has arrived in good order. A massive feeding programme has prevented starvation in the interior, and reforms will this month see a new, more stable, currency take the place of the afghani, currently standing at 40,000 to the euro.
And in a dilapidated yellow building set in its own grounds sits the sturdy figure of Mohammed Amruddin, who for 12 years braved shot and shell - and five direct hits from Gulbuddin's rockets - to guard this site, the Bulgarian embassy.
I visited him shortly after the fall of Kabul last year, when he memorably asked me if the tattered green, red and white tricolour flying by the gate was still the correct flag; knowing that Balkan nations change their flag almost as fast as Afghanistan.
The Irish Times story of his survival was picked up in Bulgaria, and Amruddin is now in line for a top foreign office award from a grateful Sofia.
A former official with the Afghan foreign ministry, he insists that despite all the problems he is optimistic: "I don't want to say it is easy. Things are not easy," he says over a cup of strong sweet tea in the embassy drawing room. "But we have something now we did not have in the times of the Taliban. We have a chance."