Afghanistan, After the War Boom --- When I was house-hunting in Kabul earlier this year, most of the available properties were the abandoned facilities of long-departed international organizations. They were compounds with servants’ quarters and gussied-up gardens, houses meant for a different era, when it seemed like the wartime wealth would carry on forever. -- In the chill of a mid-March morning, I climbed inside one of Kabul’s many vacant structures to meet some members of the middle class. The bare scaffolding of a construction site was serving as an informal shelter for men who had traveled from the provinces in search of jobs. Many were university-educated professionals who had Facebook accounts and listened to the BBC. -- One of the men—who had been sleeping on a thin mattress on the concrete floor—had previously administered a U.S.A.I.D. program in the south. Abdul Manan, twenty-seven years old at the time of our conversation, seemed despondent—not only about losing a good job, but about what would happen when American money stopped flowing to the rural districts where he had run agricultural projects, supplying seeds to farmers. “We all knew that this new wealth wouldn’t last forever, but what we didn’t understand was how quickly it would evaporate,” he said. “We were all hoping that it would last for some time. This is a mistake I made.” -- The full economic impact of the troop withdrawals is difficult to measure, as it depends on factors that are hard to predict, such as whether the Taliban rises again. The last time that the U.S. stopped paying attention to Afghanistan, after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in the late nineteen-eighties, civil war ensued. - More, Posted by May Jeong - The New Yorker