KABUL, Afghanistan A man in a tattered overcoat leans on Taj Mohammad's broad wooden desk, earnestly stating his case. Mohammad Kabul's "wali," a position somewhere between mayor and judge regards him with amused skepticism.
The man wants the wali, whose own education ended in 11th grade when he fled the Soviets, to help him get a friend into medical training. Mohammad, a black-bearded former Northern Alliance guerrilla commander, jots a note on his stationery. He signs it with a flourish and tears it off his pad.
The next man wants a job in rural development. The next wants the wali to back his side of an intertribal dispute over locating a neighborhood office. The next, an aide, wants authorization to buy a parade banner.
"Yes," says Mohammad, in a grand style extending back to medieval times. "Buy the cloth and take it to the painter."
When many Americans last tuned in, U.S.-led forces liberated Kabul as if by remote control. The Taliban fled in the face of surgical airstrikes that left hands-on fighting to Northern Alliance troops. Women flung off their burqas in celebration. Music filled the streets for the first time in five years.
Sure, the military mop-up would continue. And starving people needed feeding. But you might have concluded as developed nations pledged billions for reconstruction that the Afghan problem was pretty much solved.
As it turns out, peace in Afghanistan may be far more daunting than war. Nursing a country back to health is a lot more difficult than launching airstrikes.
Walk the streets of Kabul, and you find a devastated city lacking fundamental means of recovery. Large swaths of the capital resemble bullet-pocked Greek ruins, left not from U.S. bombing but from infighting a decade ago. Most women, fearing physical attacks from fundamentalists, still wear burqas. Even as street stalls fill with goods and Afghans rejoice at peace, sporadic violence suggests tribal, religious and political fault lines largely invisible to Western eyes.
The fault lines deepen the farther they extend from Kabul. Regional warlords fight for territory. Rival tribesmen terrorize and rob ethnic Pashtuns whose clan dominated the Taliban, unleashing a new wave of refugees. Bombed-out roads and millions of land mines slow relief shipments and prevent farming.
The current period bears disturbing similarities to the last time Mohammad's crowd took a turn running Kabul a decade ago. The mujahedeen fighters drove out the Soviets, only to dissolve into civil war that turned Kabul into a Beirut.
Back then, the United States washed its hands of the country. That disengagement led directly to the Sept. 11 attacks.
It's a failure that must not be repeated.
And yet Washington has been slow to support expanding the peacekeeping force nationwide and to provide it financial support and air cover. Members of the Bush administration reportedly disagree about whether to intervene on behalf of feuding warlords loyal to Hamid Karzai's interim government.
In the wali's dark, chilly office, a barefoot aide serves tea to a dozen men reclining on bedraggled couches, idly eavesdropping on the line of supplicants who approach Mohammad. The room falls silent each time the wali wields his pen below a picture of his martyred commander, guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, whose photograph is ubiquitous in Kabul.
A clock ticks, but time stands still. The wali dispenses power and patronage, just as walis before him have done through every stripe of administration, whether royalist, communist or fundamentalist.
Mohammad doesn't know how many people work for him almost 8,000, perhaps but he's certain they haven't been paid for a while. They lack desks, chairs and stationery, partly because the interim government hasn't yet levied taxes.
Mohammad reckons half the city is leveled. There's no major private-sector employer. A manufacturing district lies in ruins.
But those problems pale in comparison to the next challenge: Mohammad expects Kabul's population now 1.5 million, he guesses to double as refugees return home.
"Most of those people," the wali says, "won't have anywhere to live."
If local government has problems, the national picture is even more troubled.
Pink rays of sunshine crest the snow-capped peaks surrounding Kabul, piercing the diesel haze to illuminate the Inter-Continental Hotel on a promontory above the 6,000-foot-high city.
Inside the cavernous concrete building, janitors place plastic buckets in the dark lobby below a gathering torrent of water from burst pipes somewhere on the third floor. The worldwide Inter-Continental chain has long since disowned its dilapidated former property, opened in 1969 and never updated.
Afghanistan's deputy foreign minister, a white-haired, clean-shaven man, enters the hotel restaurant wearing a European-cut overcoat. He nods to the minister of reconstruction. He steps over a glowing space heater that's doubling as a toaster for resourceful guests.
During the 1960s, bikini-clad Afghan women frequented the pool at Afghanistan's first luxury hotel, where an outdoor bar served local red wine. Many educated middle-class women in those days wore Western clothes and shed their veils as the former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah, nudged the nation toward a parliamentary state. A 1972 guidebook still sold in the hotel bookstore describes a city with a modern airport, happy populace and "picturesque retreats for picnics and gay outings."
But communists deposed the king in a 1978 coup, and the Soviet Red Army invaded the next year. The Inter-Continental was caught in the cross fire with the rest of Kabul, losing its manager and two employees to a 1990 rocket attack.
Two dozen more rockets, fired from surrounding hills, hit the hotel as mujahedeen guerrillas toppled the Soviet-backed government in 1992 and proceeded to fight one another. The Taliban, who took Kabul in 1996, relegated all foreigners to the gloomy hotel. They banned dancing in the bullet-scarred ballroom and everywhere else in the country, along with television, music, kite-flying and other activities.
Freedoms have improved since then. But this morning, the members of Karzai's administration huddle over scrambled eggs, speaking in hushed tones of their late fellow hotel guest, the minister of aviation.
Abdul Rahman was killed while confronting pilgrims angered by a shortage of planes to take them to worship in Mecca. The ministers, Westernized Afghans who appear more accustomed to five-star hospitality, fear for their safety.
Slowly, they finish breakfast and walk to the front door. One by one, they fill the back seats of the gleaming white Toyota Land Cruisers supplied by the United Nations. Three bodyguards carrying assault rifles cram in behind each one, concealed by tinted glass. They speed off, ready to begin the day.
Afghanistan lacks local journalists with the tradition, training and means to investigate and debate its pressing issues. Without a free flow of information, the transition to democracy seems improbable.
Television announcer Sami Honar yar, sporting an olive-green double-breasted suit, fiddles with a microphone on the set of his unheated studio in Afghanistan's only TV station.
The 25-year-old editing board in the control room hums loudly. The producer glances at the wall clock frozen at 9:55 and directs someone to find a missing cameraman. Honar yar introduces his on-air guest, a technician who will explain the challenges of opening the government-backed station closed by the Taliban for five years.
"In 1992," says Ahmad Sha Omeri, "a rocket hit our satellite dish. Since then we have not been able to receive foreign programming or transmit our programs abroad or to the provinces."
The giant gray dish remains in tatters, a symbol of Afghanistan's dormant media and muted freedom of speech. The TV station now broadcasts citywide every day between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. It features children's programs, sports features and films. Two announcers, a woman and a man, deliver the news in wooden tones and refrain from criticizing the government.
British Broadcasting Corp. journalists are volunteering to train their Afghan counterparts. But don't expect probing analysis, telling investigative reports or provocative commentary anytime soon; the station's director is busy trying to persuade officials to permit broadcasts of women singers.
"We are living in a religious society," says Homayuon Rawi, the station supervisor. "So we still have some people who might be offended."
Educated Afghans returning from abroad are crucial to the nation's recovery, but many become discouraged.
The Afghan exile with deep brown eyes and silver-lined hair wears eye shadow, jeans and a blouse, and sips coffee in the Mustafa Hotel. She smiles patiently, demurely contradicting an acquaintance who introduces her as a princess returning from Germany.
Najma Omar-Olomi acknowledges, in fluent German, that she has ties to the royal family. Her father was a general and her uncle was protocol chief for the former king, Zaher Shah.
At 47, she's returning to her country for the first time since her family fled the Soviets. She quit her job as an X-ray technician, shipped in 50 metric tons of relief supplies through Iran and planned to resettle in Afghanistan.
"Every day since I came here I cried," Olomi says. She wept at the destruction of Kabul. She wept at the government workers whom she says do nothing and pocket foreign aid. She wept at the ruins of the family estate south of town. She wept at the poverty.
Olomi walks Kabul's streets in black shoes with stacked heels. Two bodyguards accompany her -- she fears going out alone because she doesn't wear a veil. She curses people from the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, her disdain exhibiting the derision expressed by many Afghans toward other factions. She says they rule the city now despite being uneducated. "At least," she says, "the Taliban gave women security."
Olomi says Afghans won't be free until civilian men are disarmed. She says the peacekeepers are merely symbolic. She says the 87-year-old king, who plans to return from Rome this month to preside over the selection of a transitional government, is too old to do any good.
"I came with so much hope," she says, "but I'm leaving with none."
Foreign soldiers play an essential role in Afghan stability and recovery. But securing airports, guarding and peacekeeping require close contact with local people, many of whom are armed. These tasks may be more difficult than modern, arms-length warfare.
Without a massive infusion of troops throughout the country, not just in Kabul, the peacekeepers may find peace impossible to keep.
At the bomb-cratered airport, Mark Cunliffe barks instructions at 30 newly arrived British Royal Air Force soldiers. The warrant officer holds up a succession of defused mortar shells, mines, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons that might maim or kill the fresh troops as they secure the airport.
"The particular thing about land mines," Cunliffe says, "is that they are designed to be victim-operated."
The new recruits swallow hard.
At the sandbagged U.S. embassy, U.S. Marine Steven Wolfe, from Redmond, wields an M-16 with an M-203 grenade launcher while guarding the front gate. The 193-pound former Redmond High School linebacker weighed 360 pounds when he boarded the plane to Kabul in full gear.
Wolfe, 21, never expected to guard an embassy when he joined an elite anti-terrorism brigade. But it's safer than combat duty.
Or maybe not. Members of the British-led peacekeeping force, whose Kabul patrols are mostly uneventful, field occasional potshots that set them on edge. Two British peacekeepers were sent home after firing on a vehicle that was out after the 10 p.m. curfew, killing an Afghan man who was bringing a pregnant woman to the hospital.
Yet the vastness of the challenges facing Afghanistan doesn't truly sink in until you see the countryside. A case in point is Istalif, once a prosperous pastoral town filled with fruit trees and known for its distinctive green pottery.
The drive north of Kabul takes an hour or so through the Shamali Plain, once Afghanistan's breadbasket, which was ravaged by combat as the front line moved back and forth across it for years. The barren, mine-studded valley is littered with burned-out Russian tanks, bullet-riddled shipping containers, wrecked adobe homes and hacked stumps of grapevines and fruit trees.
A sign at the Istalif turnoff says: "Welcome to burnt territory." Indeed the Taliban applied a scorched-earth approach to Istalif, burning homes, smashing every store in the bazaar, plugging wells and wrecking underground irrigation canals. The wrath of their attack is evident in the shards of pottery littering the rutted main street.
Families from more remote villages who have returned from fleeing to the Panjshir Valley last fall subsist in Istalif on donated food in a few dozen United Nations tents, some pitched in a demolished high school. Faded English writing on a remaining blackboard says: "Part 3. Answer the following questions."
Abdul Qahhar was deputy director of the school. His gutted hilltop home, overlooking the plain and snowbound mountains beyond, is surrounded by dead fruit trees once ingeniously irrigated by a network of tiny streams.
Qahhar, a Tajik tribesman born here 51 years ago, would like to rebuild the school to educate girls, this time, and boys. He wants to restore the house built by his father. He rebuilt it once before, after the Soviets destroyed it. He stocked it for his wife and six children with fine carpets, carved furniture and books in Persian, Pashtu and English. Those are gone.
"We spent all our savings during the fighting, to escape to Pakistan," says Qahhar, looking up through the remains of the roof.
Down in the valley, a horn honks. Qahhar moves quickly toward the door. It's the bus that will take him back to the capital, where many townspeople camp without power and water in decaying Soviet-embassy apartments.
He hurries down the desolate hillside, anxious not to be stranded in a place that can't support life. He reaches the overloaded bus just in time and braces for the bumpy ride to Kabul.
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