There's a vitality, even impatience for things to get on in Kabul, from the culinary scene (there's an Irish pub, and both Everest Pizza and the Lai Thai restaurant offer free delivery) to the shops doing brisk business on bootleg DVDs and CDs after a ban on music and television during the hard-line Taliban regime.
But while there's no doubt the Afghan capital has taken many steps forward, it remains a rough, tightly guarded garrison town with all the attendant problems: crime, a legion of beggars, and a fast-growing chasm between rich and poor that is being fed, in part, by the very people sent to help save the country.
In fact, life for most people is miserable, especially with the onset of the fourth winter since the Taliban's fall.
A huge influx of foreign aid and the arrival of high-salaried foreign workers has skewed the local economy, as has the booming drug trade, which accounts for an estimated 60 percent of the gross domestic product.
Rents and other costs have jumped. Some people have turned metal shipping containers into shops and homes.
Beggars have multiplied, including many women in worn burqas. Swarms of children try to sell a pack of chewing gum or a newspaper, always for a dollar.
On the hillsides surrounding the city, where residents have carved houses into the steep inclines, smoke billows from fireplaces. There is no hum of generators here, and little or no electricity. Aid agencies are giving out winterization kits to help the most needy survive until spring.
The end of the Taliban's strict edicts has not meant the end of the burqa, the all-covering women's garment that to the West became a symbol of repression. The number of women wearing them has dropped to perhaps 50 percent in the capital, but cultural change has come much more slowly than the security and technological advances.
In the countryside, the burqa has been worn for centuries and continues to be ubiquitous.
