[Reader-list] Warlordistan

[Harsh Kapoor]

The New York Times
Magazine | June 1, 2003

Unreconstructed
By BARRY BEARAK

His Excellency Ismail Khan -- ruler of the ancient city of Herat, 
governor of the province, emir of the western territories and 
commander of Afghanistan's fourth military corps -- seemed fascinated 
by the woman with no arms. ''It's amazing -- she eats with her 
toes,'' he said, looking my way. The emir had allowed me to sit at 
his shoulder during his weekly public assembly, when hundreds of 
supplicants come to the great hall of the governor's compound and 
plead for him to intercede in their behalf. As usual, Ismail Khan was 
wearing a spotless white waistcoat, whiter even than his famous fluff 
of beard, thick as cotton candy. He sat at a simple desk beneath the 
adoring light of a grand chandelier. Uniformed men hovered nearby, 
ready to be dispatched on sudden errands. Other aides in suits and 
ties periodically brought papers for him to sign, removing each one 
the instant the emir's signature was complete and then bowing before 
backpedaling away.

The armless young woman, disabled since birth, was herself dutifully 
respectful as she confided her problems with humble words and earnest 
genuflections. Her voice was a nervous chirp, her eyes hidden behind 
the meshed peephole of a burka. She asked for nothing more than money 
for medication. But Ismail Khan, pitying her disability, thought she 
should be requesting much more. ''Why aren't you married?'' he asked. 
''If you want, I will find you a mujahid to serve you.''

The woman did not know quite how to react. ''I love my father,'' she 
said hesitantly.

But the emir grew ever more pleased at his own benevolence. His mind 
was made up. ''If you marry, it would be better,'' he said.

Hour after hour it went on, the needy coming forward one at a time 
from the cushioned chairs of the waiting area, alternately a man and 
then a woman, all eager to hear a few transforming words. A few 
petitioners were keen businessmen, wanting land for a factory or 
permission to open a bazaar. Other people required the emir's 
decisive arbitration about property disputes or jailed loved ones or 
reneged marriage arrangements. But mostly, the hopeful were the 
pitifully poor, often telling stunning tales of personal tragedy, 
only to then make the most modest of requests: a visa, a bag of rice, 
use of a telephone, oil for their lanterns.

In this lordly fashion, acting in the manner of the great caliphs, 
Ismail Khan dispensed a day's worth of practical wisdom and petty 
cash. It was a remarkable display of personal might -- and one quite 
in keeping with his busy personal campaign to improve Herat itself, 
the only major city in the nation where significant reconstruction 
has taken place. Under the emir's guiding hand, roads have been 
paved, irrigation channels restored, schoolhouses rebuilt. Clean 
water has been supplied to most neighborhoods. Soon, Herat will be 
the nation's only city with around-the-clock power. New parks adorn 
the cityscape, including two that have large swimming pools and 
brightly colored playground equipment -- surreal novelties in so 
woebegone a country. ''Judge for yourself,'' the emir said one sunny 
afternoon when he was particularly given to boasting. ''Where in 
Kabul will you find families in a park after 10 p.m.? Where is there 
even a park?''

A year and a half has now passed since American bombers changed the 
course of this nation's civil war, a year and a half since the 
Taliban were forced from their commanding perches to lurk now in 
hideaways; a year since President George W. Bush pledged something 
akin to a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. The reconstruction was to be 
a mammoth effort in the spirit of American generosity to Europe after 
World War II, he said, a way to ''give the Afghan people the means to 
achieve their own aspirations.''

It would be nice to report that Ismail Khan's industriousness 
typifies a nationwide revival. But the rebuilding of Afghanistan -- 
among the world's poorest countries even before it suffered 23 years 
of war -- has so far been a sputtering, disappointing enterprise, 
short of results, short of strategy, short, most would say, of money. 
As for the emir, rather than a lead character in the restoration, he 
is actually a foremost symbol of its affliction.

(Page 2 of 11)

Nation-building, scorned by George Bush the presidential candidate, 
has now become the avowed obligation of George Bush the global 
liberator. The problem is that nations, like so many Humpty Dumpties, 
are troublesome to put back together again. The challenge -- whether 
in Afghanistan or Iraq -- is more than brick and mortar, more than 
airwaves and phone lines; this is not the kind of carpentry required 
after a hurricane.

Afghanistan has been in atrophy for a generation, with institutions 
in decay, educations in eclipse, the entire society tossing and 
turning in a benumbing nightmare. Like so many of its people, the 
nation is missing limbs. There is an overabundance of guns but only 
the beginnings of a national army and a police force. Elections are 
scheduled for next year, but there are no voter-registration rolls, 
nor is there even a working constitution. Entrepreneurs want to think 
big, but there are no commercial banks to make loans. Much of the 
land is fertile, but the only major export is the raw opium used in 
the criminal drug trade. Civil servants have again begun to collect 
salaries, but pay remains a mere $30 to $40 a month, and many workers 
rely on tolerated corruption to feed their families.

In so many ways, time seems to have halted in the 1970's, and now the 
past fails to flow logically into the present. Documents are copied 
with carbon paper and then held together by straight pins; staplers 
are largely unknown. Traffic flows in the right-hand lane of the 
roads, though these days most vehicles have steering wheels for 
left-side driving.

The country has an interim government, but it is much less than the 
sum of its parts -- and those parts are largely controlled by 
warlords like Ismail Khan in the west, Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta 
Muhammad in the north, Gul Agha Shirzai in the south and Haji Din 
Mohammad and Hazrat Ali in the east. In a hasty postwar fusion of 
distrustful factions, these men -- all American-armed allies against 
the Taliban -- were welcomed into the incipient government and given 
official titles. And while each expediently mouths allegiance to 
President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, they still maintain their own 
militaries and collect their own revenues.

''Emir'' may well be Ismail Khan's favored title. (His aides insist 
he be addressed as ''your excellency, emir sahib.'') But what gives 
him legitimacy in the current setup -- as well as phenomenal 
resources -- is his designation as governor of Herat, one of the 
great junctions on the old Silk Route and still the nation's richest 
turf. Most goods entering Afghanistan arrive by way of Iran, 
traversing Ismail Khan-controlled stretches of highway on their way 
to smugglers' bazaars in Pakistan. Truckers are obliged to pay duty 
at the Herat customs house, and while by right all collections belong 
to Afghanistan's central treasury, the emir has remitted only a 
fraction of a daily take variously estimated between $250,000 and 
$1.5 million. It is as if the governor of New York also declared 
himself the emir of New Jersey and Connecticut, keeping federal taxes 
from the region for his own purposes.

I visited the customs house and its surroundings. Not far from the 
main buildings was the largest used-car lot I had ever seen, with 
dusty autos and S.U.V.'s parked along both sides of a mile-long 
strip, each row dozens deep rising into the hillsides. Most of the 
vehicles were Japanese, shipped through Dubai and then driven or 
hauled to Herat. Merchants wearing long-tailed turbans used tents as 
offices, bellyaching about sagging profits. It was bad enough, they 
said, to be harassed for a relentless sequence of bribes. But now 
customs fees themselves had recently doubled, amounting to as much as 
$2,000 for a late-model Land Cruiser.

During a quiet moment in the governor's compound, just after the emir 
had returned from his midday prayers but before he resumed seeing his 
supplicants, I politely asked him, ''About how much customs revenue 
do you collect, emir sahib?''

''Maybe you can't believe this,'' he assumed correctly, ''but I 
really don't know.''

(Page 3 of 11)

Warlords are not the only ones reluctant to turn their cash over to 
Kabul. So are most of the donor countries providing aid. ''None of it 
goes through the government,'' said Elisabeth Kvitashvili, the acting 
mission director in Kabul for the United States Agency for 
International Development. ''If we felt the government and the 
ministries had the capacity to handle the money in a manner that 
would satisfy the U.S. taxpayer, we'd give it to them, but that's a 
big if.'' USAID has bookkeeping standards unlikely to be met by 
long-dormant Afghan bureaucrats, she said. Instead, assistance is 
channeled through the United Nations, outside contractors or private 
aid agencies -- the so-called nongovernmental organizations, the 
NGO's.

America has two ambassadors in Kabul. William Taylor Jr., the 
''special representative for donor assistance,'' calls himself the 
''lesser'' of the titleholders. He is a self-described optimist who 
nevertheless said that if some highly visible reconstruction projects 
do not start happening soon, both the Afghan and United States 
governments will be ''in trouble.''

By Taylor's math, America made $649 million available to Afghanistan 
in fiscal year 2002, which ended in September; in 2003, the amount 
should exceed $1.2 billion. While a hefty sum, even the latter amount 
is hardly Marshall Plan size. Indeed, it roughly equals the cost of a 
single B-2 stealth bomber; it is about the same amount the United 
States military spends in Afghanistan every month. But America never 
intended to go it alone, as it did in Iraq. Reconstruction was 
supposed to be a multilateral effort.

In January 2002, when the post-9/11 world still held Afghanistan near 
the center of its orbit, a conference took place in Tokyo. Fighting 
was still going on outside Kandahar, the Taliban's main stronghold, 
but there was already a sense of urgency to the matter of rebuilding 
the country. Unfortunately, with events happening in rapid flash, 
there were also many unknowns. What were to be the goals of this 
reconstruction? Was the nation merely to be restored to entrenched 
poverty, or was the objective something more?

No one knew the parameters of Afghanistan's many crises. Security 
concerns had long kept researchers from the field. What were the 
conditions of rural access roads and irrigation systems? What were 
the rates of malnutrition, TB and infant mortality?

Analysts from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the 
United Nations Development Program had hurriedly prepared a 
preliminary assessment. Though there were caveats about the guesswork 
involved in their 59-page report, they did dare to estimate costs: 
the bill could range from $1.4 billion to $2.1 billion in the first 
year, $8.3 billion to $12.2 billion over five years and $11.4 billion 
to $18.1 billion over 10 years.

But when the donors -- a dozen or so nations, the European Union and 
the World Bank -- actually opened their wallets, their generous 
impulses fell short of their compassionate rhetoric. Pledges of 
grants and loans -- made for periods of one to five years -- totaled 
$5.2 billion, only about 60 percent of the low-end five-year 
projection. Still, the help was beyond anything Afghanistan had 
received since the days of the cold war, when the tenacious 
mujahedeen, revered in the West as front-line fighters against 
Communism, were lavished with billions in weaponry. Welcoming the 
pledges, a spokesman for the transitional government said: ''We're 
thrilled. Every single dollar is appreciated.''

But soon the thrill was gone. Some pledges were slow to be paid, and 
much of the money went for food and medicine and blankets and tents 
and firewood and all the other things war-bedraggled, 
drought-parched, morbidly poor people desperately need. Refugees were 
flooding back across the border. By last fall, nearly two million had 
returned, some rudely hurried on their way by Pakistan and Iran, 
which had proved impatient caretakers, others emboldened by 
optimistic radio broadcasts. The world was promising to rebuild their 
homeland. They did not want to miss out.

(Page 4 of 11)

Of course, this reverse migration only added to the glut of the 
hopelessly poor. These people also needed emergency help. During the 
first year after the war, short-term relief efforts consumed 50 to 70 
percent of the ''reconstruction'' aid, depending on how the numbers 
are tallied. The transitional government certainly welcomed the 
assistance but objected to its being credited against the pledges 
made in Tokyo. Wasn't that money meant for hospitals and not 
Band-Aids? In fact, as time passed, that $5.2 billion began to seem 
smaller all the time. CARE International, the NGO, issued a study 
comparing per capita aid provided in recent postconflict situations. 
Afghanistan fared poorly next to East Timor and Rwanda and did even 
worse against Kosovo and Bosnia. Government officials often quoted 
the numbers, sounding wounded -- and even cheated -- reminding 
foreigners of Afghanistan's sacrifices against Soviet invaders and 
fanatic terrorists. It was hard to quarrel with the umbrage. Indeed, 
Robert Finn, the ''greater'' of the two American ambassadors, told me 
that the discrepancies in aid were all the worse because relative 
costs were higher in Afghanistan. ''There is almost no infrastructure 
left,'' he said. ''And mostly, there was never any infrastructure, 
electricity, water. You have to supply everything.'' He said that 
only 3 of 32 provinces were linked by telephone to the capital and 
that ''the country was absolutely medieval in some places.''

But what most annoyed the Afghans was how they were repeatedly 
sidestepped in the cause of their own resurrection. Though they were 
consulted about projects, when it actually came time to begin one, 
the money went into other hands. The word ''capacity'' was always 
invoked, as in, ''The U.N. and the NGO's have the capacity to do the 
job, and you don't.'' Much of the donors' thinking was realistic, of 
course. Clearly, the aid agencies -- repeating familiar tasks year to 
year in country after country -- knew better how to satisfy vigilant 
auditors in Brussels or Washington.

And just as clearly, the Afghans were very often flummoxed while 
trying to kick-start an old wreck of a government. The Ministry of 
Finance was headquartered in a huge pinkish building, but the heating 
system was shot, the roof leaked and only one bathroom functioned. 
''Physically it looked like a stable,'' Ashraf Ghani, the finance 
minister, told me in an interview. His wife, sitting nearby, added, 
''It smelled like one too.''

There was certainly no shortage of civil servants. Estimates put the 
number at 250,000, though their attendance had become as intermittent 
as their wages. International business consultants -- contracted by 
USAID -- were goggle-eyed at what they found in government offices. 
The central bank operated without a working balance sheet. Payroll 
records were scarce. When salaries were paid, there were no checks or 
vouchers. Cash was hand-carried to each province. The ''lab'' at the 
Kabul customs house -- the main line of defense against infestations 
in fruit and vegetables -- did not have a single beaker or test tube; 
it consisted of five bored men sitting in an old shipping container 
sipping tea.

"The needs are so great; everywhere you turn, it's a priority,'' said 
Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian diplomat who oversees the United 
Nations presence in Afghanistan. He is a veteran global 
troubleshooter who has also worked in Haiti and South Africa. In the 
late 90's, he tried to broker a peace between the Taliban and the 
fast-collapsing forces of the resistance, many of whom -- through the 
miracle elixir sometimes referred to here as vitamin B-52 -- are now 
central figures in the government.

When I asked Brahimi what the biggest accomplishments of 
reconstruction were, he answered, ''Probably not very much.'' For 
him, the most important rebuilding project was bringing security to 
the country, and that had yet to happen. Without it, he said, 
everything else was in jeopardy. ''The Taliban have been routed; they 
have been expelled from the capital, but they have not been defeated, 
or at least they have not accepted their defeat.''

(Page 5 of 11)

As he and I talked, there was fresh news about a particularly 
alarming murder. Gunmen at a roadblock near Kandahar had ordered 
people out of their vehicles, which in itself is a common, perhaps 
even expected practice along some roads. But these thugs let their 
Afghan captives go, while shooting a Salvadoran water engineer from 
the Red Cross. The next day, a Taliban commander phoned the BBC and 
announced a jihad against ''Jews and Christians, all foreign 
crusaders.'' Two weeks later, an Italian tourist was gunned down.

The recent attacks have not been limited to foreigners. Snipers have 
started to target Afghans employed to clear land mines from the 
terrain. Ambushes occur almost daily now, causing many aid groups to 
further restrict already limited labors. More than that, the 
incidents re-emphasize a chilling truth in a violent, gun-toting 
land. Any number of major reconstruction projects could be stopped 
with a few well-aimed bullets.

The American-led coalition against terrorism keeps more than 11,000 
soldiers in the country, including 8,500 Americans. But their job is 
combat, chasing after vestiges of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Brahimi 
is talking about something else, the confidence inspired by basic 
police work. From the start, both he and the new government have 
pleaded for an expanded international force to deter robberies on the 
roads and pillaging by vengeful warlords with ethnic scores to 
settle. A security force of 5,000 multinational troops -- currently 
commanded by the Germans and the Dutch -- is stationed in Kabul but 
does not venture into the provinces. Early on, the United States 
opposed any expansion of this detachment, and while lately the 
American attitude has been more conciliatory, American officials 
aren't in a hurry to provide troops. ''You know very well that in a 
situation like this, unless the Americans say, 'This is needed and we 
will support it,' it will not happen,'' said Brahimi. ''If I tell you 
we have a security problem, you tell me, 'No, it's too dangerous for 
our soldiers' -- who are trained, who are armed. Don't you think it's 
also too dangerous for me?''

Most non-Afghans restrict themselves to Kabul. The capital's 
population has swelled to more than three million, and while most new 
arrivals are returned refugees -- the bulk of them destitute -- 
foreigners are a conspicuous presence. Kabul is now a 
Western-friendly host. Hyatt International has agreed to manage a 
luxury hotel to be built near the United States Embassy. Souvenir 
shops and rug merchants have multiplied tenfold. Brand-new carpets 
are spread across the streets to be run over by cars, the traffic 
rapidly ''aging'' the wool for wealthier customers who prefer 
antiques. Expensive restaurants with international cuisine have 
opened. At a new spot called B's Place, the maitre d'hotel announced 
fish Valencia as the chef's daily special and suggested an 
accompanying wine, something forbidden under the Taliban no matter 
what the vintage.

Without any whip-wielding religious police officers roving around in 
black pickup trucks, Kabul's high quotient of dread has vastly 
declined. About half the women in the streets now shun the burka, 
though most continue to keep their heads reverently covered. Girls as 
well as boys are free to attend school, albeit terribly overcrowded 
ones. Satellite TV dishes, necessarily camouflaged under Taliban 
rule, openly bloom from the rooftops. Entire markets are devoted to 
music and movies sold on bootlegged CD's. There is a bustle to the 
city. Traffic congeals into jams at predictable rush hours.

Soon after arriving, I looked up an acquaintance, Sabir Latifi, a 
businessman with a great nose for the aroma of money. He has always 
had the right contacts in the right places, even when the Taliban 
governed, and as usual he greeted me with a hug as his ''first best 
friend,'' a distinction I no doubt share with hundreds of others. 
During the past year, Latifi has opened two guest houses, a 
restaurant and an Internet cafe, as well as businesses in 
advertising, real estate, tourism and computers. But the really big 
money was eluding him, he complained gravely. He lacked financiers to 
stake him in the bottling of mineral water, fruit juices and soft 
drinks. He needed a packing plant so he could export produce. ''But 
this is a country without any banking laws, so the big international 
companies don't want to invest,'' he said. And that was not the worst 
of it. Hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid was flooding 
into Afghanistan only to stream right out again. Humanitarian 
agencies with hefty start-up costs were all spending money overseas, 
buying cars, computers and generators from international suppliers. 
Construction contracts were being won by foreign companies. ''Where 
is the money for us Afghans?'' he wanted to know.


(Page 6 of 11)

This was a question ruefully asked throughout the country. Western 
Kabul, the most-bombed-out part of the capital, still has the 
postapocalyptic look it acquired in the early 90's when rival Afghan 
armies used it as a battleground. What is left are the mutilated 
carcasses of buildings, their roofs gone, walls chewed away, columns 
sticking up like stalagmites. The neighborhood is now a favored 
sanctuary of the former refugees. Seventy families live in the 
remnant hollows of a sandal factory. One recent morning, a 6-year-old 
boy named Munir wandered sleepily out of a third-floor doorway and 
into the empty air a few feet away, falling to his death.

''We've been told nothing but lies,'' insisted Rozi Ahmad, one of the 
boy's relatives, speaking for a collection of nodding men standing 
behind him inside the factory. Buoyant talk on the radio had enticed 
them to come back. And though their children now carry bright blue 
Unicef book bags to reopened schools, and though they occasionally 
receive a 50-pound sack of free wheat, most feel deceived. ''Even if 
you drive, you see the destroyed roads are the same, unchanged, no 
repairs,'' Ahmad said, extending an arm toward the horizon. ''There 
was supposed to be billions of dollars. How has it been spent?''

Indeed, there is a notable lack of edifices to show for the money 
that has arrived so far -- a total of $1.8 billion, according to a 
government agency that coordinates with the international donors. The 
most-talked-about project is the repair of one of the world's worst 
highway systems, the torn-up circle of bone-jarring bumps and 
car-swallowing ruts that connect Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, 
Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad. Promises for financing have been made 
by the United States, the European Union, India, Iran, Japan and the 
World Bank. But little work has begun.

''For a road to be built properly, it must have a proper design, and 
a design is time-consuming,'' Karl Harbo, head of the European 
Union's aid office in Afghanistan, told me. He said planners were 
cutting as many corners as possible, but the job will be especially 
toilsome because of ''sanded-up culverts'' and ''broken retaining 
walls,'' to say nothing of land mines. ''You don't want to build a 
road that will need repair in two or three years.''

Ambassador Finn said much the same thing about the entire 
reconstruction process: ''It's like building a house. You have to 
figure out what you're doing and gather materials. Building a country 
is the same thing.''

The road is highly symbolic to Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's dapper, 
patrician president. Last year, during a visit to America, he and 
George Bush shook hands on a pledge to get the project finished. 
Karzai remains disappointed. ''Reconstruction in the manner we wanted 
it, with the speed we wanted it, has not taken place,'' he said, 
calibrating his words, not wanting to let his frustration stray into 
ingratitude. ''In the eyes of the Afghan people, reconstruction means 
visible permanent infrastructure projects'' like roads, dams and 
power plants. ''The Afghan people don't seem to like these quick-fix 
projects, where you give them a dirt road and the next rainy season 
it is gone away.''

In September, an assassin's bullets barely missed Karzai as his car 
moved through a crowd in the middle of Kandahar. Just months earlier, 
he accepted American bodyguards after one of his vice presidents was 
shot dead. Detractors insist that Karzai is a lackey for the United 
States and the possessor of so little power that he is little more 
than the mayor of Kabul. But those criticisms are overdrawn. He has 
managed to hold together a multiethnic cabinet in an ethnically 
divided country, and his closeness to the Americans and the United 
Nations actually endows him with clout. Though he has often seemed 
reticent to exercise his power, in mid-May he did try to bring 
opponents in line with an artful use of petulance. He threatened to 
quit.

''Every day, the people of Afghanistan lose hope and trust in the 
government,'' he complained in a speech. The catalyst for this public 
lament was the threadbare treasury. Once again, civil servants were 
going without pay. We have the funds, Karzai said: ''The money is in 
provincial customs houses around the country.'' He put the total at 
more than $600 million. Unfortunately, he said, very little was being 
forwarded to Kabul.

(Page 7 of 11)

Karzai then held an emergency meeting of governors and warlords from 
the border areas, including Ismail Khan. He got them to sign an 
agreement promising not to hoard the revenues or launch their own 
military attacks. Such promises have been dutifully made before, only 
to be selfishly ignored later.

But merely getting Ismail Khan to attend was a victory of sorts. He 
isn't always so cooperative. The month before, all 32 governors were 
summoned to the capital. The president and the interior minister 
chewed them out. You need to be more responsible about security, they 
were told; you need to clamp down on farmers growing poppy, who have 
again turned Afghanistan into the breadbasket of the heroin trade; 
you need to turn over your revenues. Three governors were not 
present. Two had phoned in with legitimate excuses. Ismail Khan chose 
to send his deputy, who merely said that the emir extended his 
regrets.

Why not just fire someone like Ismail Khan? I asked Karzai.

''Governments cannot behave in a trigger-happy manner,'' he told me, 
saying that it was far too soon for such confrontations. 
''Governments have to think and then decide.''
The political part of reconstruction is at least as important as the 
physical -- or so I was constantly told. It was hard to disagree. The 
latter, no matter how well built, won't last very long without the 
sanctuary of the former. The Kabul government must prove that it can 
assert authority -- protect people, collect taxes, dispense jobs, 
build things. For now, warlords big and small control their customary 
fiefs. ''There's no law,'' Brahimi of the United Nations said, 
summing up. ''You're at the mercy of the commander, who will at any 
time come and demand money, take your property, force you to give 
your daughter in marriage.''

President Karzai is a Pashtun, the nation's largest ethnic group. But 
the defense and foreign ministries and the intelligence service are 
dominated by Tajiks from a single district, the Panjshir Valley. One 
of them, Defense Minister Muhammad Qasim Fahim, headed the Northern 
Alliance and marched into Kabul with his troops nine weeks after 
9/11. Many Afghans consider him to be nothing more than a warlord 
himself. His large, well-equipped army remains bivouacked in and 
around the capital.

Last June, during the loya jirga, or grand council, Karzai was 
formally chosen as interim president, to hold office until a new 
constitution could be written and a national election held in June 
2004. Many Afghans thought this was an opportune time to rid the 
country of its regional chieftains. Indeed, with so many American 
troops deployed, the warlords themselves were anxious about 
surviving. But the Americans still had use for the commanders in the 
quest for Al Qaeda, paying some of them to put their soldiers into 
the field. And at the time, Karzai was more concerned with finding a 
balance among rival ethnic groups. He wanted to pacify the powerful, 
not confront them.

Though ethnic tensions remain, a new fault line has opened that may 
be equally divisive. Welcomed into the government have been several 
''neckties,'' Western-educated exiles who have come back to assume 
high posts. Karzai seems to rely on them more and more. ''Without 
Afghans who have been trained in Europe and America and other parts 
of the world, Afghanistan cannot go forward,'' he told me. Who else 
has the education? he asked. Within the country, a generation has 
passed without the development of new skills. ''It's a gap. It'll 
take God knows how many years to fill.''

The most powerful ''necktie'' is Ashraf Ghani, who is not merely the 
minister of finance but also the president's closest adviser and a 
man with a hand in almost everything. Surpassingly erudite and 
surpassingly fond of displaying it, Ghani, 54, has a Ph.D. in 
anthropology from Columbia. He taught at Johns Hopkins. He worked at 
the World Bank for 11 years, traveling widely, studying third-world 
economies, managing the reform of the Russian coal industry. He is, 
by virtually all accounts, a brilliant analyst with a warehouse 
memory. Also, by virtually all accounts, he is an acerbic man who 
does not suffer fools gladly and defines that category most broadly. 
''He has that sting-y tongue,'' Karzai said, well aware of what he 
has unleashed. ''It hurts.'' Several ministers have grown to loathe 
Ghani. All seem to fear him.

(Page 8 of 11)

The finance minister comes from a well-known, well-heeled family of 
the Ahmadzai, the largest of the Pashtun tribes. Many of his 
ancestors served Afghanistan's royalty, including a 
great-great-grandfather who was executed. ''They said his neck was 
too precious, so they hung him with a silk rope,'' Ghani told me one 
evening at his home in the capital's best neighborhood. I had been 
eager to meet him and found him in a relaxed mood, somewhat fatigued 
but charming. The tart side of his tongue made no appearance. His 
wife, Rula, who is Lebanese, sat with us as her husband narrated a 
short personal history. ''My family has been dispossessed five times 
in five different generations,'' he said. Both of his grandfathers 
served as mayors of Kabul. ''Every male member of my family was 
imprisoned'' when the Communists took over the country in 1978, he 
said. ''The women had to sell the bulk of the land to keep the men 
alive.'' At the time, he was studying abroad.

His exile lasted 24 years. Brahimi named him as a special adviser 
soon after 9/11. The prickly anthropologist immediately became the 
bridge between Afghanistan and the foreign money. Ghani can talk in 
the mannered jargon of the international lenders, and he has been 
able to persuade more of them to give their grants directly to the 
government. At the same time, he has assumed the role of cabinet 
watchdog, using the budget as a hammer against any loose accounting 
by fellow ministers. He sometimes berates them in cabinet meetings. 
''If any expenditure is declared ineligible, meaning not according to 
the rules, I cut exactly the same amount from their budget,'' Ghani 
said with a chuckle. ''And if it repeats, a second offense, I'll cut 
double their money.'' Opponents think him power-mad.

For Ghani to truly control the nation's treasury, he will have to 
humble the warlords and collect all those customs fees. He and 
another ''necktie,'' Interior Minister Ali Jalali, have even spoken 
of a highway patrol that would accompany cargo-carrying trucks in a 
caravan from the border, bypassing all illegal collection points 
along the way. Ghani has also visited some of the warlords himself, 
staking claim to funds. He was greeted warmly by Ismail Khan but then 
sent home with the promise of only $10 million. ''I have a delegation 
in Herat, working the numbers,'' Ghani told me rather legalistically. 
If Ismail Khan ''doesn't remit the budgetary resources, then he would 
be an outlaw.''

But what sheriff would arrest the emir?

These men are two of the stranger bedfellows that lie in 
Afghanistan's future. Ismail Khan, 56, is a short, stocky man whose 
face pairs a knowing smile with a fierce stare. He wears a black, 
gray and white headdress that perfectly accompanies his dark 
eyebrows, gray mustache and snowy beard. His portrait appears nearly 
everywhere in Herat. Patriotic posters often couple him with Karzai 
or the war hero Ahmad Shah Massoud, though Khan is always the one in 
the foreground.

Back in 1979, Ismail Khan was merely a junior artillery officer. He 
became involved in a mutiny against the Communists then ruling the 
country. And later, after the Soviets invaded, he became a guerrilla 
commander. By dint of battlefield success -- as well as of the 
coincident deaths of other contenders -- he emerged as the leader of 
the resistance in Afghanistan's west and a self-proclaimed emir. 
After the Soviets skulked away in 1989, he assumed the governorship 
of Herat, his popularity ebbing and flowing during a turbulent time 
of civil war. He was in an ebb phase when the Taliban -- then known 
as pious champions of law and order -- succeeded in taking the city 
in the fall of 1995. The emir escaped to Iran, and when he later 
returned to fight, he was the victim of an ally's betrayal and ended 
up as his enemy's most famous prisoner. He spent more than two years 
in a Taliban jail, often manacled in a zawlana, an iron device that 
hitched his neck to his wrists and ankles. A young Talib intelligence 
officer helped him in a nerve-racking escape through the desert. 
Ismail Khan's getaway vehicle hit a land mine, and his leg was broken 
in the explosion. The Taliban were furious when the wounded emir 
surfaced safely, again in Iran.

(Page 9 of 11)

Ghani, by contrast, is clean-shaven, with the frail look of a 
professor who spends too much time indoors. Two operations for cancer 
have removed most of his stomach. With so much of his insides cut 
away, he is forced to eat frequently in small quantities, 
continuously irrigating himself with fluids. Kidney stones have 
tormented him. He complains of constant pain, though this does not 
seem to keep him from working 16-hour days. His speech is deliberate, 
often a monotone, and his reservoir of intellect provides him his own 
kind of forcefulness. Despite being the consummate ''necktie,'' these 
days he wears loose-fitting Afghan clothes and constantly fingers a 
strand of prayer beads.

Ghani allowed me to attend some of his meetings one day. In the 
morning, his large office filled with half a dozen key staff members, 
all seated on sofas and armchairs. Conspicuously, most were 
Westerners -- those consultants paid for by USAID, dressed in 
conservative business suits and shined shoes. ''We've been in the 
Kabul customs house from one end to the other, and we have a very 
good idea what's happening there,'' one reported. Not surprisingly, 
they had found gross inefficiency amid grosser corruption, or perhaps 
it was the other way around. Computerization was prescribed. Ghani 
said he would ''talk to the Koreans'' about it. They sounded like 
commandos plotting a takeover.

The rest of the morning and afternoon were spent in a single meeting 
about ''D.D.R.,'' shorthand for disarmament, demobilization and 
reintegration, the means by which the warlords might gradually be 
made to relinquish their militias. Unavoidably complicated, the 
program is also unmistakably essential, and Karzai had asked his 
finance minister to convene an extended session with United Nations 
staffers who had been reconnoitering among the country's many armies. 
''I have my standard list of 100 questions,'' Ghani said: what are 
the functions of each unit? What kind of loyalty is there between 
commanders and men? What incentives would make a soldier agree to 
quit?

''We'll need strong public relations,'' one United Nations staff 
member said. ''Commanders and soldiers will need to believe they are 
getting more by disarming.''

The overall idea is for Afghanistan to build a national military of 
70,000, commanded by the government in Kabul and for now trained by 
the United States and France. So far, fewer than 4,000 soldiers have 
finished the training course. The warlords are not encouraging it. In 
fact, men like Ismail Khan insist that their soldiers are already 
part of a national force ready to defend the nation. They see no 
reason to disband their units or give up their tanks and artillery. 
For the troops in the militias, D.D.R. threatens their livelihood and 
hence requires something like a buyout plan, each soldier receiving 
some incentive in cash or training or a job. Commanders at all levels 
would need even more extravagant temptations.

Exactly how any such plan would work is far from certain. Perhaps the 
biggest problem is sequencing: who D.D.R.'s first? Most of the 
warlords have at one time or another been on opposing sides in civil 
war. In the north, the forces of Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta 
Muhammad still frequently kill one another, fighting over spoils. But 
whatever happens, D.D.R. will necessarily proceed one small step at a 
time. ''What we're talking about in the north is basically preserving 
the balance of terror,'' Ghani told the group.

The finance minister himself would inevitably be involved in the 
payouts of cash to the demobilized armies. In such situations, 
arguments invariably ensue. It happens now with the government 
payroll. In a nation without ID cards -- or birth certificates -- it 
is hard to know whether money is going to actual employees or to 
phony names. ''I won't pay them, and this bothers a lot of people,'' 
Ghani said at one point to no one in particular, musing. ''Sooner or 
later, they may pull the trigger. They'll have to decide whether they 
want to shoot me. To me, it's not so important an issue.''


(Page 10 of 11)

None of the top men in the government are good risks for life 
insurance. Still, this seemed an odd declaration. Perhaps it was for 
my benefit, to show commitment or bravery. As I left the meeting, 
Ghani stopped me and repeated the thought. ''I really don't care if 
they kill me,'' he said. ''There are worse things than dying for a 
good cause.''

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission is relatively new. In 
March, it opened its first satellite office in a freshly painted 
house in Herat. There was a big celebration. Lakhdar Brahimi 
attended. So did Interior Minister Ali Jalali. Even Ismail Khan went, 
which could have been viewed as a bold gesture: the emir had been the 
subject of two damning reports by Human Rights Watch, likening his 
rule to that of the Taliban. I had looked into some of the 
allegations, and while I thought the reports overheated, people were 
definitely fearful of criticizing their emir. I met a lawyer named 
Rafiq Shahir, who heads a council of professionals. Last year he 
dared to be a critic. ''During the night, they broke through the gate 
of my house and took me,'' he said. ''My hands were tied, my eyes 
covered. They beat me for 30 minutes in the desert.''

Ismail Khan is disdainful of the charges against him, which to his 
ears were then all-too-gleefully repeated on Radio Free Afghanistan, 
a station financed by the United States. It has a reporter named 
Ahmad Behzad, whom the emir finds unfair and nettlesome. In speeches, 
he has compared the young man to those ''who served the foreigners 
during the Russian occupation.''

As it happened, Behzad was also at the celebration. After the main 
ceremony, he stopped the interior minister and began taping an 
interview. Unfortunately, the two men were blocking a narrow iron 
stairway that kept the emir and others from getting to the food. The 
exact words said at the time are in dispute. But everyone agrees that 
Behzad asked the minister about the sad state of human rights in 
Herat -- and that soon after, the emir informed the journalist that 
he ''had no honor'' and ought to leave right away. When Behzad 
promptly exited, he was smacked around by one of Ismail Khan's men, a 
startling sight at any time but a stunning one at a human rights 
gala. The emir later ordered the radio reporter to leave Herat, 
causing several other journalists to stage a strike in outrage.

''I got another call today from Kabul, asking me to straighten this 
out,'' the emir told me with irritation. He looked down, shaking his 
head, mashing his great white beard into his chest. Some in the 
central government considered the incident an embarrassment. But 
Ismail Khan thought he had already squared everything. The 
journalists had been invited to return, though now Behzad had left 
once more, fearing for his life.

I had not planned on asking the emir about the matter. But he brought 
it up one afternoon as we sat comfortably in his guest house on 
well-stuffed furniture upholstered with fringed cloth. The Persian 
rugs covering the floor were elegant, though they themselves were 
mostly covered by other rugs even finer. On the wall was a huge 
painting of the emir sitting on some boulders, holding a radio, 
calling in antiaircraft fire. Following his extended rant against 
Behzad, I questioned him about the ''neckties.''

''Our brothers who come from the West without understanding the 
traditions of the people -- about holy things and about the war -- 
they are taking us toward bad times and will soon face the anger of 
the people,'' he said somberly if oratorically, speaking in Dari. 
''Our brothers from the West have seen Afghanistan from far away. I 
see it clearly. For example, in Kabul, a city in which there has been 
23 years of Islamic revolution, there are some parts where alcoholic 
drinks are being sold.'' He sighed. ''The people won't tolerate that. 
They can't tolerate that because they have lost their sons, they've 
suffered from bombings, they've had revolutions. Now they want to 
live under a regime that is Islamic.'' He waited for the translator 
to catch up so he would not be misunderstood. ''Our country is 
completely different from those that are 100 years ahead of us. The 
freedom these Afghans from the West have seen is not suitable for 
here.''

I wanted to pursue these thoughts, but an aide gave a signal, and my 
audience with the emir was over. Someone scurried right in to take 
the teacups off the table.

Certainly, Ismail Khan was correct about the nation being deeply 
scarred, perhaps even more than those living in exile could 
understand. This scarring has left people yearning for peace. They 
also want good government of the type that provides safety and 
schools and doctors. Though unused to much in the way of government 
services, most Afghans are well aware of a world with piped water, 
dependable electricity and easy access to telephones. Democracy may 
not rank high on their wish lists, however. Many Afghans associate it 
with the West, with kafiran, or the ways of the infidel. It brings to 
mind provocative clothing and disobedient children.

For now, a warlord like the emir has an advantage over the ministers 
dealing with the chaos in Kabul. He gets things done -- and people 
can see it. I talked with truckers who handle long hauls across the 
country. On most runs there is one bogus checkpoint after another 
with soldiers charging ''taxes.'' There are also ordinary bandits, 
and in most of the country truckers no longer risk travel at night. 
''But on Ismail Khan's roads you can drive at any time without a 
problem,'' said Abdul Razaq, who was carrying 10,000 gallons of 
gasoline.

The reconstruction of Afghanistan needs to show some intrepid 
reconstructing -- and fast. Ashraf Ghani speaks of the ''moral 
authority'' of the government as ''leverage'' over the warlords. 
After all, he says, the loya jirga chose only one leader, the 
president. But Ghani also understands the leverage he would have if 
he could deliver the goods. ''No one will want to be seen standing in 
the way of $100 million in development projects,'' he said. The 
government can win over the people by proving it exists in more than 
a name.

On March 17, President Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours either to 
head into exile or to face doom, thereby committing America to 
another war and another reconstruction. That same day, Ghani spoke at 
an annual conference of Afghanistan's donor nations in Brussels. He 
laid out three possible outcomes for five years down the road.

The first possibility was a Western-friendly democracy with a strong 
central government and enough new infrastructure to establish a 
thriving private sector. The second was yet another floundering 
third-world country that borrows money it cannot repay and lifts 
virtually no one out of poverty. The third was a narco-mafia state 
where opium producers and warlords create enough mayhem to thrust the 
nation into the whirlwind of anarchy.

Ghani said that each possibility carried both direct and indirect 
costs. The direct money was a predictable sum paid upfront. In the 
case of Possibility 1, Ghani said, the price tag would be $15 billion 
to $20 billion over five years. Indirect costs were more difficult to 
calculate, he said, though recent history provided guidance. After 
the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, the West also walked away, 
turning its back on its former allies and leaving them with a 
catastrophe of a country. Possibility 3 then rapidly evolved. And 
from the turmoil arose the Taliban. They restored order with 
religious oppression and allowed their nation to become a hostel for 
anti-American Islamic terrorists.

A year ago, it would have been hard to predict that Afghanistan would 
be playing postwar second fiddle to Iraq. What happens if the second 
chair becomes third or fourth?

''They gave me a window frame, but I never got the door they 
promised,'' an old man named Masjedi told me. He had a long, angular 
face with deep furrows in his forehead and a long white underhang of 
beard. We were standing in the village of Deh-i-Naw in the Shamali 
Plain, just north of Kabul. Built on a hilltop, the hamlet offers a 
beautiful view of the churning Guldara River, which cuts through the 
valley. But up close, Deh-i-Naw is largely a ruin, just like most of 
the Shamali. The Taliban rampaged through the area in the summer of 
1999, emptying towns, executing young men, carrying off women, 
burning houses, machine-gunning livestock, sawing down fruit trees. 
They meant to scorch the earth, leaving no imaginable reason to 
return. Masjedi had safely escaped. One of his sons lost a leg to a 
land mine, but otherwise the family survived better than most. 
''That's my house over there,'' he said, facing the mud-brick hovel 
he had rebuilt. ''I came back but not most of the others. There isn't 
much to come back to.''

He looked at his new window frame and tried to recall which NGO gave 
it to him. He was grateful for the wood, though sorry the aid workers 
hadn't returned. ''What was the name of that group?'' he asked 
himself to no avail. A few miles away, a dozen NGO's had placed their 
signs near the road, but the words were in English, and he could not 
read them.

To change the subject, he pointed to the river and told a story of 
how its medicinal waters had once saved a sick man from a sure death. 
He lived in a lovely spot, he said.

''But we need a door.''


Barry Bearak is a staff writer for the magazine.


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