Beside a model of a jumbo jet listing sadly on its perch, huddled in a greatcoat that is his only protection against the winter chill seeping into a cavernous and unheated office, the operations manager of Afghanistan's state airline dreams of the good old days.
That was 20 years ago, when travel posters saying "Fly Ariana to the land of historical interest" did not seem so bizarre. "Back then, we had too many destinations," says F.M. Fedawi. "We were flying to Tashkent, Moscow, Prague, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam and Beirut before the war - their war, not ours . . ."
But the world of Ariana - and of Afghanistan - has shrunk drastically since the Soviet invasion of Christmas 1979. It contracted another notch on November 14th, when the UN imposed sanctions on Afghanistan to press home Washington's demand that the ruling Taliban militia hands over Osama Bin Laden. The Islamist fugitive, who was born in Saudi Arabia but was stripped of his citizenship, is wanted for the bombing of US embassies in East Africa last year. Since 1996, he has found a home in Afghanistan.
Officially, the UN sanctions are restricted to freezing the overseas bank accounts of the Taliban regime, and blocking Ariana international flights. But the sanctions have a knock-on effect: on the aid agencies scrambling to fly food and medicine into one of the world's poorest countries, and on the millions of Afghans scattered around the world.
For Afghanistan, pummelled by war and so destitute that the average daily wage will stretch to just six pieces of nan bread, they are devastating. With the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan fell off the hippie trail and was reincarnated as a Cold War battlefield, where plucky Muslim warriors colluded with the CIA and Pakistani intelligence services to help destroy the Soviet Union.
That accomplished, it dropped off the map again. Afghanistan returned to the western consciousness three years ago when the Taliban, a rag-bag collection of fiery Islamist ideologues, roared out of the desert to capture the Afghan capital. A mystery to the outside world, its leader a one-eyed village cleric few had ever seen, the Taliban - which means students - made its stamp on the popular imagination as Islamic zealots who harboured terrorists and drug traffickers, barred women from working and girls from attending school.
In the villages, home to 95 per cent of Afghans, where women have always lived within the confines of the chaderei - the all-concealing cloak the Taliban made mandatory - the restrictions posed no problem. But in urban centres such as Kabul, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif, the Taliban edicts bred hatred. They also demonised the Taliban in the west, deepening the divide between two cultures apparently incapable of comprehending each other.
During all these years of isolation and ruin, the postal service was one of the few institutions that still worked in Afghanistan. Letters were carried on Ariana's last surviving international route, to Dubai, taking just four days to arrive in Kabul from Europe. They carried news and often crisp US dollar bills from nearly 4 million Afghan refugees around the world. Many families in Afghanistan now rely on their charity.
Now, with no foreign flights, no foreign postal service, no telephone system to speak of, landlocked Afghanistan's only remaining connection to the outside world is roads battered by tanks, rockets and missiles to neighbouring Iran and Pakistan. It is three years now since the Taliban militia captured the capital, Kabul, but the regime is still consumed by war. During the summer, when the Taliban launched an offensive to rout its last surviving enemy, some 1,500 fighters died before fighting broke off for the winter. The battlelines left the Taliban, as before, in control of 90 per cent of Afghanistan, but recognised as the government of Afghanistan only by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Taliban seat at the UN is still occupied by its opponents, an insult that rankles less now with the rulers of Kabul given the urgency of other problems, the greatest being Washington's obsession with getting its hands on Bin Laden. The Taliban now claims that, had the West been more sympathetic three years ago, the stand-off over Bin Laden might never have happened, and Afghanistan would not be so isolated today.
"We are a country totally destroyed by war, and more than 95 per cent of our people are illiterate. From these people, and from this country, you should not expect everything to be up to your satisfaction," says Sher Mohammed Abbas Stanikzai, the deputy health minister and one of the more outward-looking of the Taliban.. "There will be many wrong things in a country like Afghanistan - you should not expect everything to be like it is in the United States. Just criticising from miles away does not help."
The regime maintains it would like to carry on the lurching dialogue with US officials on Bin Laden. The Islamist warrior's whereabouts are secret, although he is believed to spend much of his time in the northern province of Kunar. However, the Taliban claims Washington is toying with it. "If they really wanted a solution, we are ready," says the foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil. "But if they again concentrate on the handover of that gentleman, we do not call that negotiations."
Officially, Bin Laden is a guest in Afghanistan, and surrendering him to the US for trial - or even encouraging his departure - would violate sacred traditions of hospitality.
It is also a political impossibility for the Taliban, a movement at best an unhappy confederation of Islamist ideologues, guerrilla commanders, tribal chieftains, freebooting warlords, even former communists. What little cohesion the movement now has is due to its defining ideology: an uncompromising and forcefully imposed version of Islam. "They have been held together by the fact that they are fighting an Islamic war, and by the fact that they are almost invincible," says an aid worker who has spent several years in Afghanistan. "How can they now give up one of their warriors? They have not come this far by being pragmatic. They have come this far by saying they want to build an Islamic state. It would undermine their whole effort."
Three years after taking Kabul, there are signs of change. Women are more visible in the streets - or at least the forms of their blue chaderei are. Families now feel bold enough to watch pirate copies of Titanic on forbidden television sets. But if the Taliban has slightly relaxed its grip on popular morality, it has not yet been transformed from a movement into a fully functioning administration. Within the combustible mix that is the Taliban, the former communist old guard of the 1980s - bureaucrats from the ancien regime - are the only ones with the skills to govern. But they are more intent on sabotage, demoralised by an average monthly wage of four US dollars, and seething with fear and contempt for the poorly-educated country bumpkins who are their new masters.
In the cities, the corruption and the daily intrusions into public life continue to grate. Men are angry about a law that bans trousers and decrees baggy salwar kameez, that forbids long hair, but makes long beards compulsory. But they do not have the strength to resist. "We are tired, and the Taliban are tired. The Ministry of Vice and Virtue is still patrolling. But they also know they cannot put everyone in jail," says a civil servant in Kabul.
Such tacit accord does not mean stability. The list of Taliban achievements since seizing Kabul is brief: restoring electricity for 36 hours out of 48, re-tarring a few roads, putting away the Kalashnikovs that were once seen everywhere in Kabul. It does not include feeding the people of Afghanistan, or rebuilding the parts of the city where only the shells of buildings remain.
One of these lunar landscapes is in Kabul's District Six, once the most desirable place to live. Nowadays, it is home to tens of thousands of internal refugees. Each day, several hundred widows turn up at the food distribution centre there for the American charity, Care, flipping off the top of their burqas once they are safely in the womenonly zone. They squat down in line and gossip, or feed their babies. For many families the food - 32 kgs of wheat, 9 kgs of cooking oil, and 9 kg of pulses - must last a month. "I haven't tasted meat for four years," says Aqila. She is raising her son and daughter alone after a rocket exploded on her home, killing her husband and three other relatives. Aid agencies say there are 300,000 like her in this city of 1.2 million, kept alive by their rations. She has not heard of the sanctions.
Few Afghans believe there can be any gain in giving in to the US demands. They argue that Washington's insistence that the regime hand over Bin Laden is a pretext to strike at the source of the movement's strength: militant Islam. For Afghans, whose rare moments of unity come mainly in the face of a foreign enemy, that is unacceptable.
"In my point of view, the most important reason is Islam. The US and other countries do not want Islam in Afghanistan, and they do not want Afghanistan to be strong," says Mohammed Ibrahim, a school headmaster in the Khogiani district. "If we give up Osama to the US, they will just come back and say: `Well, you are not giving rights to women'. Then they will ask us to stop growing poppy. It is more than the problem of Osama. It is the problem of Islam."