Unlike businessmen of Mr Khodorkovsky’s type, who made their first money in the market, the bureaucrat-entrepreneurs have prospered by dividing up budget revenues and by racketeering.
Zaher happens to be a prince, the grandson of the late Afghan monarch Zaher Shah, and he has far more clout around Kabul than the ordinary bureaucrat.
A member of the Salesian order, whose particular mission is to work with the young, he is quintessentially a pastoral cleric rather than a church bureaucrat.
He is up against a political neophyte: an adviser and bureaucrat who was almost unknown just a couple of years ago, and who has never before fought, let alone won, an election.
During Soviet times a successful bureaucrat could expect to live in a good but modest three-bedroom flat, with modern furniture. He could expect holidays on the Black Sea coast.
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