Diary 
Christian Parenti
Along the narrow tarmac road linking Kabul to Kandahar you could be in New Mexico: green valleys, with scattered trees turning orange and yellow; clusters of adobe-style walled compounds; and looming above huge barren mountains and empty blue skies. This small road is one of the few signs of progress in an appallingly underdeveloped country; indeed, it is one of only very few paved roads in the whole of Afghanistan. It cost international donors a mere $198 million, and thanks to it remote villages in south-east Afghanistan are building new links with the global economy, though these links aren’t always of the sort imagined by donors and planners.
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Christian Parenti, whose latest book is The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq, is a research fellow at the City University of New York’s Center for Place, Culture and Politics.
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