We asked the question—because we're doing the “five years later” report—in a survey: “Are you better off now? Are you better off in the last five years, or what has changed in your financial circumstances?” I think the answers in rural Helmand and rural Kandahar were “We're worse off.”
You can see the remnants from when the Soviets were there, in the cities of Lashkar Gah, Kandahar, and Kabul, of large building projects—schools, ministries, and in every city there's a big bread factory. A lot of this is destroyed now, of course. There was a lot of infrastructure development. In the schools, there were a lot of people who were taught in Russian engineering, so there was a generation of engineers.
The Americans were in Lashkar Gah in Helmand province for a while; you can see the remnants of that. There was, if I can use this term, a “westernization” of Afghanistan at a certain point. Most of that's gone.
You hear nostalgia for the Russians and you hear nostalgia for the Taliban now. The first time I heard nostalgia for the Taliban, my heart sank when they said “We were better off then.”