Gayle Williams, say those who speak for her Taliban assassins, was killed on Monday because she was a proselytising Christian. The charge is denied by SERVE Afghanistan, the British aid group the 34-year-old worked for, which says this is a “convenient excuse” for a “completely opportunistic” murder.

It is easy to see how the “opportunity” to kill Williams came about. Westerners working in Kabul (comparatively secure, even now) are advised not to operate in the way that Williams did. Women are warned that it is better if they do not walk in the streets alone, and both men and women are told that they should avoid falling into habitual patterns, for the all-too-obvious reason that routines make people vulnerable to planned ambushes.

Most aid workers live and work in places that offer some degree of armed security, often hotels, and have cars and drivers on call whenever they wish to move about the city. But Williams lived in a modest private house, and walked to work without a guard each day. She believed, it is reported, that it was right to live among the people she was trying to help.

It is easy, also, to understand why Williams might have felt that way. I’ve only spent a week in Kabul, reporting on the work of another British charity, Islamic Relief. But even working under the auspices of this group, which has a modest operation in the capital, employing only Afghans, it was clear that it costs an awful lot of money just to keep an aid worker – or a journalist – closeted and safe.

In 2002 it was estimated that it cost, on average, $250,000 a year to maintain a foreign UN employee in Afghanistan. Williams, who worked with the least lucky of the unlucky people of Afghanistan – disabled children – was likely to have considered that such sums would be better spent on her charges, rather than herself.

She would have been far from alone in harbouring such views. They were something else that Williams shared with many of the Afghan people that she was trying to help. Since the reconstruction effort started, seven years ago, rents in Kabul have become ludicrously high, for example, forced up by the influx of foreign workers seeking offices and homes and willing to pay whatever is asked to get them. In a city half-flattened by war, struggling to accommodate returning refugees, and the hundreds and thousands of widows and children who have fled to the city from the rural areas, the Kabul property bubble has been a further nightmare for ordinary people seeking a roof over their heads.

The streets of Kabul too, are jam-packed with expensive four-wheel-drive cars, often belonging to organisations that rely on them completely for every move that they make about the city. Early in the reconstruction it was considered a good idea to emblazon the name of your organisation on your vehicles, to display that you were not a poppy baron or a gangster with one of the organised commodity mafias, but a friend and a helper instead.

Latterly, NGOs have started doing the opposite, as disillusionment with the aid effort has set in. Still, one cannot help but notice that the contrast between that degradation and poverty in the streets, and the opulence of the vehicles that are crawling through them, verges on the obscene.

It is well documented that the aid effort in Afghanistan has been “poorly coordinated”. But the understatement of that analysis verges on the obscene as well. I have no wish to denigrate the individuals who are out there working under incredibly stressful conditions. But from what I saw, much of that expensive charitable work is highly inappropriate under the present circumstances anyway.

Gayle Williams was just one of many women who are in Afghanistan as part of the aid effort, and many of them, like her, are engaged in purely humanitarian work. But a number of the women I spoke to – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – are engaged in “consciousness-raising”, and concentrate on promoting the intellectual liberation of women.

They find their work inspiring, and report that women are receptive to what they have to say. But the unpleasant reality is that it is absurd to squander time and energy on explaining to women that they have every right to educate themselves and to work outside the home, when neither the economy nor the security situation allows them to put such heady ideas into practice.

Anyway, in a conservative Islamic culture like Afghanistan’s, it is easy to present such inroads as western and decadent. Few would wish to appease the Taliban, and its repellent views about women. But there is a real danger that the huge focus on women’s rights, in the midst of such chaos, actually helps the Taliban to recruit for its miserable cause.

Priorities other than the focus on women – championed pre-invasion by Barbara Bush and Cherie Blair – have been shaped by the preconceived ideas of the coalition. Huge resources are poured into promoting democracy, for example, with people buzzing around trying hard to register as many voters as possible. Yet the ghastly truth is that there is no one to vote for really, anyway.

Hamid Karzai, for good reason, is little respected, and nor is his corrupt government packed with former Northern Alliance warlords. Yet he is undisturbed by anything so troubling as a credible political challenge. His administration continues its old fight, with the Taliban. Karzai’s administration was never the fresh start it was presented as being, and Barack Obama’s open criticism of it is a sign that this particular US delusion, at least, will soon be at an end.

In 1979, at a politburo meeting prior to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, argued against military action: “It’s completely clear to us that Afghanistan is not ready at this time to resolve all the issues that it faces through socialism. The economy is backward, the Islamic religion dominates, and nearly all of the rural population is illiterate.”

It is now clear that Afghanistan was no more ready to resolve its issues through liberal democracy in 2001 than it was for imposed socialism in 1979, and probably even less ready. The received wisdom is that the failure properly to reconstruct Afghanistan’s infrastructure and economy after September 11 has been a vast and tragic mistake. One cannot help but see, in this case anyway, the sense in Niall Ferguson’s observation that the US is an imperial empire in denial, “imposing ever more unrealistic timescales on its overseas interventions”.

The death of Gayle Williams is a synecdoche as well as a consequence of that great error – which dictated that an international community of well-meaning civilians should be implored to come and work in a country precisely because it was and remained one of the most unstable and dangerous on earth.

Williams died because she understood the horrible paradox of what she was doing, and didn’t want to live like a cosseted outsider, in a parallel world to the people she was trying to help. We shouldn’t accept the Taliban’s line – that she died “because she was a Christian”. She died, on the contrary, because she lived by principles that both Christianity and Islam claim to promote. That fact shouldn’t be overlooked or forgotten.—Dawn/Independent News Service