The consequence, said Grono, 'is festering grievances and an alienated population that turns against those believed responsible for the abuse - be they warlords turned governors, the government in Kabul, or the international forces who support them'. His comments followed warnings from international watchdogs earlier this year that the country was again in danger of becoming a 'failed state'. The sense of alienation is hardly surprising. What optimism that there was after the fall of the Taliban has largely dissipated. With 40 per cent unemployment, and faced with drought, rocketing food prices and vast amounts of aid money squandered, the international community's promises to transform Afghanistan - six years on - ring increasingly hollow.

They are issues that, along with pervasive corruption, weak government and the struggle to impose the rule of law, will be thrust to the fore again this week as Afghanistan's government is offered a 'last chance' once more - requesting an additional $50bn in aid from donor nations at a conference in Paris being portrayed as a 'new deal' for the country. The question is whether it is too little, too late, to save Afghanistan from being engulfed in a new catastrophe......

The accumulating crisis is building around both the failure of governance and the Taliban's renewed insurgency. Despite national elections in 2004 and 2005, democracy has failed to gain any real traction. Karzai's Western-backed government, in trying to buy off rival warlords and factions who were once powerful, has created a charmed inner circle. The warlords have found themselves new jobs in the Interior Ministry or police, where they continue to protect drug traffickers. Some of those accused are among Karzai's closest associates - including his brother Wali. When asked, the unemployed who gather at the roundabouts, the tribal leaders, and the women activists, the journalists and the housewives list the same complaints. Karzai, they say, is 'weak'. Security is disintegrating. His cabinet is corrupt, the country is in danger again of descending into warlordism.

Civil servants and teachers are not paid a living wage, while most confront widespread endemic poverty and large-scale unemployment. They point, too, to a growing crisis of legitimacy that many fear will be exacerbated by the coming three-year electoral cycle that has seen those in power engaged in scrabbling to shore up their positions with alliances and deals.....

Western officials concede one of the country's most pressing problems is that Afghans are no longer being persuaded that the course set out in the Bonn Conference and the Afghanistan Compact of 2006 has any meaning for them. It is a sense of a coming crisis that is being driven by facts available to all, Afghans and members of the international community.

Suicide bombings last year were up by 27 per cent over the preceding year, and up 600 per cent in comparison with 2005. Taliban attacks increased fourfold over the same period. Two months ago the International Crisis Group outlined a series of scenarios facing Afghanistan without further help - all catastrophic. It raised the spectre of civil war on ethnic lines; the creation of a criminalised drug state; the Pashtun south abandoned to extremists or, perhaps most alarming, of regional powers being drawn once again into Afghanistan's crisis....

t is left to a lorry driver from Lashkar Gah to say: 'There are no jobs.' And he complains that there is too little security despite the British base. 'We are all thinking about who will be the next ruler of Afghanistan. If foreign troops go, the Taliban will come. Then there will be resistance and chaos, like there was before. For now there is no peace, no security, no central government. During the time of the Taliban I was left in peace.

'There is an old Pashto proverb,' he adds ruefully. 'The old thieves were better than the new.'

A COUNTRY BY NUMBERS

12 per cent: Level of female literacy (male literacy is 32 per cent)

33 per cent: The number of Afghans who do not have enough to eat

8,000 Afghans killed in 2007 war

40 per cent: The estimated unemployment rate

90 per cent: The amount of the world's heroin produced in Afghanistan