Darul-Aman Palace stands on a ridge outside Kabul, a silent testament to the unfulfilled promise of Hamid Karzai's reign as president of Afghanistan. Constructed in the 1920s by a king who tried – and failed – to drag his country into the 20th century, the Western-style building is today a symbol of the failures of a very different government.
During his first term, President Karzai commissioned a £36 million refurbishment, designed to make Darul-Aman a proper home for Afghanistan's new, democratic parliament. It never left the drawing board. Instead, the pockmarked concrete walls – evidence of the decades of bitter fighting that have scarred the country – sit behind a barrier of razor wire, open to inspection only after a suitable bribe has been offered to the foreign-trained soldiers guarding the fence.
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