No one yet knows if this price is one that present or future occupants of the White House will consider worth paying. Either way, I have yet to meet an Afghan who sees peace as imminent.

And if Gul Haider had ever expected his moment of glory in capturing Kabul ten years ago to end the conflict in Afghanistan, then his views now are similar to those of every other Afghan I spoke to last autumn: "The Taliban will continue to fight, as will everyone else, all locked into it for different reasons," he told me, as we stared down from the heights above Kabul's northern suburbs, where he had savoured his transient victory so long ago. Below us the Afghan capital stretched out in an indistinct brown smear of traffic fumes and November mist. "I can't see anything today that suggests the war will end in my lifetime."