Later that evening, a senior European diplomat who asks not be named explains how in Central Asia the great game hasn't ended. "It's going on here between a declining Russian power, manifested in tight spy rings, a soaring Chinese economic power, the waning power of America and the influence of European donor countries. Who's going to win the new great game? The Chinese. Russia doesn't have enough money and the West is on the way out here and will probably pull out when economic problems worsen at home." 

To our right sit Spanish soldiers from a nearby Nato base, drinking beer. Officials from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) are absorbed in dinner and laptops. Two uniformed French officers stroll in for espressos. A group of over-optimistic US students cluster around a table with some exiled Green revolutionaries from Tehran. 

Outside the glass window wall, the rain falls harder. A tottering, green-robed ancient staggers towards the window and starts undoing what appears to be his belt. A sodden skullcap on his head, he unfurls from his waist a tattered shawl inches from my table, yet hundreds of socio-economic light-years away. "He's making a show of it," snaps one American. Placing the robe on the cracked, slippery paving stones, he falls to his knees in prayer. 

It is in this curious café that I meet a well informed young operative of a Western diplomatic organisation, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He sketches out the situation of quasi-slavery that exists in most of the Tajik countryside. "Irrigated areas still have Soviet-style cotton quotas, even if the people are technically allowed to farm whatever they want. However, they are forced to buy supplies, such as seeds, from designated mafia-like suppliers. This sinks them into a debt that they cannot repay, creating deepening poverty." 

The economy is choked by parasitical mafias, known as the president's "family". These thieves control most aspects of trade, agriculture, industry and energy. Tajikistan does not have a real economy. Estimates are that remittances from the 50 per cent of the labour force working in Russia account for the equivalent of 50 per cent of GDP. The drugs trade out of Afghanistan accounts for the other 50 per cent. Carefully playing off the powers, Tajikistan is morphing into a narco-state. Afghan hashish is squidgy and mellow but as I begin to understand what a joint at a party at the end of the supply chain means, I feel a little queasy. 

Rumours swirl of the mujahideen crossing the mountains. In 2009, an Afghan warlord known as Mullah Abdullah crossed the border, kicking up dust and suffering, and then vanished back over the gorges along the River Panj — the Oxus of legend — into northern Afghanistan.