All the issues that existed in 2007 remain today, and the list is long. Corruption and warlordism eat away at this beautiful place like cancer. Despite laws enshrined in the constitution that grant equal rights to all citizens, women have virtually no protection. The controversial Elimination of Violence Against Women law (EVAW) that came into force in 2009 is rarely invoked. Judges either don’t know about the law or don’t believe in it, and many lawyers have no legal training. Barely a week passes without some crime perpetrated against a wife or mother, a sister or daughter, making headlines. 

It doesn’t stop there. Isis are gaining ground and infighting in the Taliban ranks after the death of Mullah Omar has left a deadly vacuum at the top of the organisation.

None of that detracts from the spell Afghanistan has cast over people for centuries. I was enticed back on and off until 2012, when I left for the last time, hardened and more cynical. We foreigners lived an exhilarating parallel existence in the “Kabubble”. The restaurants, the parties — those were heady days when the work was exciting and full of possibility. As aid money has dried up, and Nato troops have been withdrawn, that world has largely disappeared.

Afghanistan may have fallen off the front page, but the fascination continues. It’s like an addiction to heroin; we can’t seem to get enough of the “exotic” land, and the “barbarity” of its customs. Two recent non-fiction books, a new play and a new film all deal with Afghanistan. Pink Mist, at the Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush, London, tackles the aftershocks of life in the military for three British soldiers who were deployed to Afghanistan. In the Danish film, A War, we follow the complexities of command in the theatre of war. The books, Rod Nordland’s The Lovers (Ecco Press, £16.99), and Robert D. Crews’s Afghan Modern (Harvard, £22.95), relate two very different stories about the country. Both touched on my own experiences, which I tried to capture in my Dispatches from the Kabul Café (Advance Editions, £10.99), about life in a war zone. Women and war — always intoxicating.

Nordland, a former New York Times Kabul bureau chief, writes about a young couple known as Afghanistan’s Romeo and Juliet. They are poor and illiterate and from a remote part of the country, and they defied their family, social custom and punishment by death by marrying for love. The story gripped the nation as well as international audiences and has given many young Afghans hope. Nordland crafts the romance of Ali and Zakia into a bleak parable on the status of women. He spells out in no uncertain terms the dire landscape of misogynistic laws and a culture that treats girls and women as commodities to be bought and sold, married off, given away to settle debts, enslaved and murdered. They are rarely cherished, loved or respected. He believes that the mujahideen fought against the Soviet invaders with such fierceness because the Russians wanted to educate and liberate women. Reform has always been a thorny and contentious subject throughout Afghan history and has brought down many a leader.