From the New York times
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Four years after American-led forces ousted the Taliban, the United States has spent $1.3 billion on reconstruction in Afghanistan, intending to win over Afghans with tangible signs of progress. And indeed, there are some. But to Afghans, the Turmai clinic is emblematic of what they see as a wasteful, slow-moving effort that benefits foreigners far more than themselves.
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The stakes are enormous. Afghans, famed for briefly tolerating and then viciously turning on occupiers from the British in the 19th century to the Soviets in the 1980's, are increasingly disenchanted with the American-led reconstruction program.

Meanwhile, the United States hopes to withdraw 4,000 soldiers from the country's south next spring; a drop in overall foreign aid is expected; and Taliban attacks are rising. So both Afghan officials and foreign diplomats are assessing what has been achieved during the past four years, and many are disturbed by what they see.

Government ministers here say that the foreign consultants and contractors the Americans pay for are producing shoddy work and achieving little - though charging dearly.

"Assistance is coming to Afghanistan, but we don't know how it is spent, where it is spent," said Amin Farhang, the Afghan minister of economy, who oversees foreign assistance programs.

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Gus news has seen pictures of a bloody high multistory glass blue shopping center in the middle of Kabul.... Disfiguring the city?... Afghani could not be shopping there anyway, could they? No sign of an hospitals though, but a clinic is still being built...

Excellent, all very American democracy style, the rich people shop while the poor die... remember New Orleans? I have it from reliable sources that reconstruction and stuff is VERY slow... Now that the international media has retreated and moved on to the next catastrophe.somewhere else...

Yes Gus & in the meantime, the Taliban are back, along with record opium crops & a ‘puppet’ government in Kabul to do the bidding of the US.   

"In Zabol province, on the Pakistan border, where the former religious students control virtually all the villages, the choice is simple, a merchant explains: get arrested by the government because you wear a beard, or get killed by the Taliban because you look like a spy ..."

The Return of the Taliban

‘The Indian writer Vandana Shiva has called for an "insurrection of subjugated knowledge." The insurrection is well under way. In trying to make sense of a dangerous world, millions of people are turning away from the traditional sources of news and information and toward the worldwide web, convinced that mainstream journalism is the voice of rampant power.  

The great scandal of Iraq has accelerated this. In the United States, several senior broadcasters have confessed that had they challenged and exposed the lies told about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, instead of amplifying and justifying them, the invasion might not have happened. 

Such honesty has yet to cross the Atlantic. Since it was founded in 1922, the BBC has served to protect every British establishment during war and civil unrest. "We" never traduce and never commit great crimes. So the omission of shocking events in Iraq - the destruction of cities, the slaughter of innocent people and the farce of a puppet government - is routinely applied.  

A study by the Cardiff School of Journalism found that 90 per cent of the BBC's references to Saddam Hussein's WMDs suggested he possessed them and that "spin from the British and US governments was successful in framing the coverage." 

The same "spin" has ensured, until now, that the use of banned weapons by the Americans and British in Iraq has been suppressed as news.’ 

The News Revolution Has Begun

‘John Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. The Pentagon secretly awarded him a US$16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. He is a leader in the strategic field known as “perception management