Afghanistan's Broken Postal System

Photographs by Lawrence Cohen

What would a post office be without a postmaster? This gentleman with the red phone and the private desk is clearly the top man in Herat.

Stamp storage, inventory and bookkeeping at the Herat General Post Office were rudimentary. "When I departed Herat in August 2006," Cohen observed, "the post office was demonstrably more organized and cleaned up than it had been a year earlier."