Gideon Rachman is the Financial Times foreign columnist. He recently was in Afghanistan with Rice and Miliband and at his blog reported from inside the bubble:

The security is so tight that it must be virtually impossible for visiting western dignitaries to form any spontaneous impression of Afghanistan. Rice and Miliband arrived early this morning on an unadvertised flight from London. They were immediately put on a military plane to Kandahar – but did not leave the military base there. Then it was back to Kabul, and a short drive to see President Karzai on a road that had been cleared of all traffic. Then it was time to visit some more troops in a gym at Nato HQ. And that’s it.

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I was told that British official advice is strongly against staying in a hotel in Kabul, so the embassy are putting me up. The diplomats are holed up in their official compounds and told not to visit markets or to eat in town.
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It’s difficult to know what to make of it all. Anyway, I’m saving that up for my newspaper column next Tuesday.

The promised column was published today and it certainly shows how effective the bubble has worked on Mr. Rachman himself. He hasn’t seen anything of the real Afghanistan, but writes that it is Too soon to give up in Afghanistan. The column is highly manipulative:

The west clearly was far too complacent about Afghanistan. In 2003 Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, proclaimed that the war was over. But by then an anti-Nato insurgency was beginning in the Afghan countryside.

So "the west", whatever that may be, was "far too complacent". NATO invoked Article 5 on September 12, 2001, but the U.S. didn’t want any help from NATO. Rumsfeld – certainly not a representative witness for "the west" by the way – declared major combat over in Afghanistan in May 2003. 

Rachman says "by then an anti-Nato insurgency was beginning". But in May 2003 there was no NATO in Afghanistan. In July there were about 50 NATO troops in Kabul. UN resolution 1510 was passed by the UNSC on 13 October 2003. Only after that were NATO troops allowed to operate outside the capital. They established small compounds in eight cities, not in the countryside. Only in 2005 NATO took over operations in the south. There certainly was no "anti-NATO insurgency" in Afghanistan in 2003. Rachman is obviously fudging history.

A recognition that Afghanistan is likely to be a wild, poor and tribalised country for many years to come should not obscure the fact that life has improved for ordinary Afghans since the fall of the Taliban. Millions of refugees have returned to the country. Schools and roads have been built. Kabul, which was a shell-scarred wreck and home to just 300,000 people in 2001, now has a population of close to 3m.

According to the United Nations Population Division Kabul in 2000 had 1.9 million inhabitants, not 300,000. 

Rachman has seen Kabul through the rosy tainted windows of an armored SUV traveling with Rice on a road cleared of any traffic. He has not been to a market or eaten out. But Kabul is great.

Some seem to differ: Kabul gets 3 hours of electricity a day

The electricity shortage underscores the slow progress in rebuilding the war-torn country. It also feeds other problems. Old factories sit idle and new ones are not built. Produce withers without refrigeration. Dark, cold homes foster resentment against the government.

In Kabul, power dwindles after the region’s hydroelectric dams dry up by midsummer. This past fall, residents averaged three hours of municipal electricity a day, typically from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., according to USAID, the American government aid agency. Some neighborhoods got none.

It is of course likely that Rachman did not experience any electricity outage in the UK embassy.

Municipal workers – under direction from the Ministry of Water and Energy – funnel what power there is to politicians, warlords, and foreign embassies.

In his travel blog report Rachman was miffed about comparison with the Russians:

But I’m slightly disturbed by occasional echoes of the Russians’ unhappy period here. When there was some discussion about whether our plane would be able to land on a snowy Kabul airport, an Afghan remarked – "The Russians always landed in the snow." And when there was talk of sending girls to school in Afghanistan, I was told that the Russians had been keen on that too.

There is reason to be disturbed. While the Russians lost against an insurgency fueled by "the west", i.e. Stinger missiles given to the Taliban by the U.S., they at least had some capabilities "the west" seems not to have:

"Life takes power," said Jan Agha, a 60-year-old handyman from west Kabul who recalled how the city had plentiful power during the 1980s Soviet occupation. "If you have electricity life is good, but if there’s no electricity you go around like a blind man."

A quote from a recent book by long time French-German war correspondent Peter Scholl-Latour (my translation):

After the Soviet Army let, the regime of the communist dictator Nadjibullah stayed in control for another three years. If the Americans would leave, today’s president Karzai would not survive for three days.

The typical window-dressing propaganda has to stop. The only reconstruction I observed in Kabul was a huge mosque, a large Islamic university which will inevitably become the hotbed of religious zealots and the extremely luxury, tasteless and heavily guarded super-homes of drug-barons and war-profiteers. Beyond these are miserable shacks of at least 2 to 3 million inhabitants. Public authorities and occupiers have lost control over these shanty-towns a long time ago.

But unlike Scholl-Latour, who walks the grounds to report, Rachman travels in the bubble. Drunk on embassy cool-aid, he urges to continue the occupation of a country he knows nothing about.