The king has breakfast from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., even if the line of petitioners goes around the block.

To do this, he withdraws to his private room, a room furnished with glittering armchairs and ornate little tables, on whose wall the white flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan hangs huge.

A servant brings bread and rice with chicken.

The king forms the rice into balls with his fingers, dips them in sauce, covers them with a piece of chicken and puts them in his mouth.

The sauce drips down his chin.

After the last bite, he sends the servant to fetch water and a cloth for cleaning.

Only then does he reach for his mobile phone, which has been ringing non-stop, and accepts the homage of those who expect to benefit from being close to him.

Fulfills the wishes of one, dismisses the other with sharp words, complains about the burden of his office: "Day and night you want something from me.

help me help me

Am I then God and can help all those in despair?”

The king's name is Muhammad, but that doesn't matter because someone else might be in office as early as next week.

One climbs the new throne of Afghanistan if one curries favor with the rulers and can also read, write and use a computer: skills that those who were warriors yesterday and now run the country often lack.

Anyone who can load and operate an AK47 is far from being able to build and lead a state.

But one wrong decision is enough, an excess of powers - and you're thrown out of the merry-go-round of filling posts.

A backdrop, like in the movie

Of course, the king was never crowned, and his audience chamber, where he receives petitioners, a few hundred a day, is in a tower with an iron staircase at the bottom of which a grating blocks the way.

Only a narrow door leads through this lattice, no wider than a single person.

In front of them is the sentry, three bearded, long-haired men with Kalashnikovs and batons who look like extras in a pirate film.

You could smile at them if they didn't decide about weal and woe, yes, maybe even life and death.

Anyway, nobody who lands at the bottom of these stairs can smile anymore.

Not after days, sometimes weeks, of waiting, after nights of sleeping outside the gates, clutching application forms and the last few dirty bills you'd like to give away,

In an era that is now spoken of in Afghanistan as if it were a golden age, when Western soldiers were still believed to bring peace, the king was a nobody.

An official who day in and day out stamped passports and issued documents.

But when the Taliban formed a new government and the state institutions reopened, he was promoted to head of the passport office.

A position so powerful that it ennobles you without a crown.

For in collapsing Afghanistan, a passport means an escape from a future that is dark and cheerless.

But above all: what is possibly the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the present day.

The World Food Program estimates that 22.8 million people in the country are at risk of starvation, 2.4 million of whom will hardly be able to avoid death,