Sultan Faizy

When NPR's Kabul bureau caught fire recently, it came as a pleasant surprise that the fire department in the Afghan capital is good at putting out fires.

It's one of the most touted "positive statistics" about Afghanistan: Today, there are 10 million Afghans enrolled in school, 40 percent of them female.

Under the Taliban, about 1 million boys and almost no girls were attending schools. Western officials routinely point to the revived education system as a sign ...

You think getting a passport or renewing your driver's license in the U.S. is a headache? Well, welcome to Afghan bureaucracy. On July 7, Kabul correspondent Sean Carberry asked producer Sultan Faizy to begin the process of renewing Sean's six-month resident visa. Here's Sultan's log of what happened:

July 7: ...

Despite Afghanistan's fierce winter, it's rare to find a house with insulation or a modern heating system. So Afghans rely on bukharis, stoves that look like an oil drum with a big rusty pipe growing out of the top that bends off into a hole in the wall.

That fact ...