Op-Ed Contributor -- Kabul’s City on the Hill --- KABUL, Afghanistan — Just south of the city center is the most famous of Kabul’s many dun-colored mountains. It is called TV Hill, after the telecom and broadcast antennas that crowd its peak like needles in a pincushion. One of the most visible signs of the Western presence in Afghanistan, it is hailed as a symbol of post-Taliban progress. -- In fact, TV Hill is a microcosm of a nation divided. Conflict has made Afghanistan, a traditionally rural country, more urban. Since the beginning of NATO’s war in 2001, many people have left their home villages and moved to cities looking for safety and work. These waves of migration have left on TV Hill a kind of sociological sediment, with different groups of different means settling at different levels up the slope. The higher, the poorer. -- On Saturday, Afghans will vote in the second round of the election to replace President Hamid Karzai. But for the 20,000 or so families who live on TV Hill, the runoff is yet another distant technicality with a mysterious influence on the minutiae of their lives. --- One morning last February, several weeks before the first round of voting, my translator, Qadeer, and I set out to climb the hill. The base, a dense warren of flat-topped houses, is home to former refugees of the civil war and the Taliban regime in the 1990s who returned to Afghanistan after the United States-led NATO invasion. -- That day, Wali Mohammad Safed, a tall and bearded middle-aged man, was taking a break from selling apples at his stall and puttering around his cement-and-brick house. It stood out against the tawny landscape of mud-walled homes. -- I asked him how much it was worth. “Without NATO, it is worth $20,000,” he said. And with NATO? “Forty thousand dollars!” -- For residents of the foothill, the word “NATO” is shorthand for the bounty brought by the international community. When Mr. Safed, an ethnic Tajik, first moved here there was no water or electricity. The foreign-aid boom brought both. Various development projects have cleared away mines, garbage and human excrement. -- Mr. Karzai was a fool not to sign the bilateral security agreement with Washington, Mr. Safed lamented, referring to a pact that would have allowed a significant number of American troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond this year. Without continued assistance, he warned, the advances that have been made will come undone. -- In addition to the Taliban insurgency, which remains undefeated, a major threat to stability after the United States withdrawal will be the state itself. Most institutions are rotten, eaten away by incompetence and corruption. Yet President Obama announced late last month that only about 9,800 American troops would remain in Afghanistan by early 2015 and none by 2017. - More, May Jeong is a reporter living in Kabul., NYTimes, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/opinion/kabuls-city-on-the-hill.html?hp&rref=opinion