The village of Karaghuzhlah, Afghanistan, quivers in sunlight refracted above the northern Afghan desert: a dusty phantasm rising out of limitless metallic plains beneath unending sky. Gnarled trunks of mulberry trees stand above hand-slapped clay walls. Within these walls, about 10,000 Pashtun, Hazara, Turkmen, Uzbek and Tajik farmers live in narrow, centuries-old streets that hug crooked irrigation canals. On better days, the canals run with icy snow-melt from the Hindu Kush. On worse days, the canals run dry.
Mostly, they ooze black slush, old grudges, millennial regrets and blood shed in fighting, both ancient and recent.
There are four ways to reach Karaghuzhlah. You can rattle in a taxi up a northbound unpaved road from Mazar-e-Sharif, the capital of Afghanistan's Balkh province, then cut west on two tentative ruts that gnaw through loess soil and disappear almost entirely when it rains.
You can descend from the sky in helicopters, the way American troops did one night last year to arrest a young newlywed carpenter who they said was a Taliban operative.
You can ride a motorcycle at night across the plains, moon-blued and tufted like a camel's hide, the way Taliban gunmen did a couple of months after that Nato night raid.
Or you can walk across the desert. This is how nearly all travellers get to Karaghuzhlah, because travellers here usually don't have motorcycles, don't fly helicopters, can't afford a taxi.
When they journey, most Afghans journey on foot.
I have been coming to Afghanistan for more than a decade. Over the past two years I have spent many days and nights in Karaghuzhlah (I have travelled to the village in a taxi, by motorcycle and on foot). My hosts were farmers, warlords, government workers, drug dealers. The mother of a policeman killed by a Taliban bomb in Kandahar. The widowed mother of the carpenter taken away by Nato troops.
All of them lived hand-to-mouth in a land neglected, brutal, beautiful and flawed, where war is mostly tangential yet omnipresent.
None of them had access to qualified healthcare, sanitation, electricity or paved roads. The tens of billions of aid dollars that the world has pumped into Afghanistan since 2001 have been siphoned off by kleptocratic officialdom in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif, and have never reached this stunning and stunningly beleaguered homestead, the way it has never reached most of the overwhelmingly rural country.
The last 11 years of war have done little other than prolong the violence people here have endured for centuries, adjusting their alliances to survive as fighters in different uniforms claimed dominion over their villages, eking out a besieged existence against the backdrop of a deeply brutalised land.
Life expectancy and literacy in Afghanistan remain among the lowest in the world; the child mortality rate remains one of the highest; women's rights remain abysmal. So why should the withdrawal of Nato troops, or the strategic partnership agreement the United States and Afghanistan signed this week in Kabul, make any difference whatsoever in Karaghuzhlah?
One night last year I asked a man who had been teaching Pashto to Karaghuzhlah's high school boys for three decades to name the most significant change to the life of his village. After thinking a minute, he replied:
"My students. They are no longer bringing their Kalashnikovs to class, like they did before the Taliban came." That was 15 years ago. To my learned host, the most noteworthy change in his village took place in 1997.
"Our trouble," the American author Barry Lopez once wrote about the 500-year history of vandalism, avarice, slaughter, and exploitation of North America by European conquistadors, settlers and their descendants, "has been that from the beginning we have imposed, not proposed."
Such tradition of arrogance continues in the West's neo-colonial approach to Afghanistan, where during more than a decade of war Washington and its allies have been trying to impose their social and economic ideas. No matter how good the intentions, the United States has been, if you will, travelling to Karaghuzhlah by helicopter, mangling silver-bloomed almond branches each time it lands.
The outcome mostly has been unsuccessful, often catastrophic. It has exposed the disconnect that from the start has beset the discussion about how to solve what the West considers to be Afghanistan's problems.
This week's long-term and largely symbolic bilateral agreement that covers social and economic development, security and regional collaboration, and is designed to placate those who worry that Afghanistan will be abandoned after 2014, has the potential to do more of the same.
But as the United States and Nato wind down their military engagement in Afghanistan, there also exists the potential for a new kind of interaction between this deeply fissured country and the West: one in which it listens.
The rediscovery of the foreign role in Afghanistan will require humility, because the West may not like what it hears. It may hear, as I have in Karaghuzhlah and other villages in different parts of the country, that many Afghans - yes, women, too - embrace the Taliban, and that no central government has any credibility with the population. They will hear that such lofty and beautiful (to the western mind) ideas as democracy and public education for women are irrelevant in a society that is held together by age-old hierarchies, and which typically considers it immodest and even disrespectful for women to participate in the economy outside of their homes.
They will hear that accessible and quality health care, passable roads, and viable distribution of water for irrigation - all far less telegenic than a classroom full of uniformed girls in neat white headscarves - are more important.
Is it too late now to reconsider the West's road to Afghanistan? For between 14,000 and 34,000 Afghans killed in fighting since 2001, and for the countless hundreds of thousands more Afghans who died of illness, neglect and poverty that this latest war had caused or helped perpetuate, the answer, tragically, irrevocably, is yes.
But 30 million people - among them, 10,000 people in Karaghuzhlah, that shimmering and blood-soaked oasis in the middle of a war zone - continue to pick their way past the pendular swings of immemorial violence as they have done for hundreds of years. They will keep doing so with or without the involvement of the West.
To them, 2011 was a year not much different from 2001: a year of celebrations and toil, of children born and dying, of hardship and joy, of desolation and beauty. With an effort that may require more self-reflection and modesty than money - it costs a few thousand dollars a year to install and run a village generator, for example, a laughable fraction of the $120 billion the United States spent in Afghanistan last year - the world has a chance to make the year 2024 a little easier for them, a little better.
But the only way to do so is to do so on their terms. It may not look interesting on video snippets. It may not bring the sense of instant gratification that high-speed culture teaches the West to crave. But the passing of time is felt differently in Afghanistan. This, too, the West must learn to appreciate.
Outsiders must learn to journey to Afghanistan the way Afghans themselves do. They must learn to go on foot.
Anna Badkhen is the author of, most recently, Afghanistan by Donkey, an e-book. She is at work on a book about timelessness.
