At points on our patrol through the moonscape dotted with villages, I interview several local people. All are brutally frank: It's been four years with no real change. They desperately want a better road so they can reach Herat to the west and Kabul to the east. Their sense of isolation borders on panic.

Later, in the civil affairs tent, a young USAID rep tells me he's lobbying his superiors to set up a micro-credit scheme. The guy, who is not supposed to be talking to me, has a bunch of other ideas. But in the past four years this province of around 670,000 people has received only $6 million in USAID funding. With so little money invested here, many of the NGOs that arrived in the first wave after the US intervention have now pulled out.

This, ultimately, is the problem: Afghanistan is very poor, and the international occupation here is not doing enough to change that. Even if the Europeans go in with a sensitive approach and deploy their best troops, limited money will mean little or no progress.

Back in Kabul I get an interview at the US Embassy, where the official mood is all clean-shaven, fresh-pressed optimism, backed up by PowerPoint presentations and development-speak gibberish about stakeholders, capacity-building, business clusters and empowerment. I am allowed to meet a man who knows lots about USAID but whose handler insists he must be identified only as "a US government official." It's a ridiculous inside-the-compound contrivance. The unidentified "US government official" says several interesting things: Yes, USAID has problems with bureaucratic ossification. Yes, there is corruption in Afghanistan. But his final candid point is most important: USAID money for Afghanistan this year will be half what it was last year, and because of Iraq and Katrina, everyone in Kabul is "pessimistic" about the size of any midyear supplemental.

As the empire drifts, the Taliban grow stronger. But who are the Taliban, and why are they placing bombs, attacking foreign troops, infiltrating ever deeper into Afghanistan and provoking a crisis for the international occupation? Some say the Taliban are fragmented beyond coherence and don't even exist. Others say they are controlled by Al Qaeda. Still others say both are controlled by the Pakistani intelligence service.

Western reporters rarely make contact with the insurgents. But my colleague and interpreter, Ajmal, thinks we can meet them. He and I hook up with an Afghan TV journalist who was in the Taliban's ministry of information and still maintains contact with the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is a rogue and a lush with no real political beliefs. We'll call him Mr. TV.

The plan goes like this: We drive the rather sketchy but newly paved road south into Zabul Province, to the countryside just outside Kandahar. There we bribe the local security commander to get safe passage into a canyon where we meet the Taliban. The security commander is supposed to tell the local American base that any armed men in a certain canyon are paramilitary police and should not be fired on by passing airplanes.

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