- L - Afghans load an airplane with aid for victims of Pakistan's deadly earthquake, at Kabul airport October 10, 2005. The consignment included four tonnes of medicines, blankets and tents. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

Afghan suicide attacks kill 6, wound 8

Kandahar (Reuters) - Two suicide explosions in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Monday killed six people and wounded eight, officials said. They said a suicide bomber blew himself up in the city center, killing a senior anti-Taliban commander and three others.

Eight people were also hurt in the blast which was followed by a second in which a suicide bomber died on the road leading to the airport when a bomb strapped to his body exploded prematurely, said Kandahar governor Assadullah Kahlid.

There were no other casualties, he said. U.S.-led troops are based at Kandahar airport. "Both incidents were the work of suicide bombers of Taliban and al Qaeda," Khalid said.

Among the victims killed in the first blast was a former senior factional commander, Agha Shah, Kandahar police chief Colonel Mohammad Hakim said. "I can say now that at least four people, including Agha Shah, have lost their lives in the explosion," Hakim said.

Body parts from the victims of the first explosion were strewn on the dusty road outside Shah's house in a crowded area of Kandahar. Shah was among local commanders who helped U.S.-led forces to overthrew the Taliban government in 2001.

A Taliban commander, who identified himself as Sabir Momin, claimed responsibility for the first incident. There have now been four suicide attacks in less than a week in Kandahar, the Taliban's former stronghold.

On Sunday, four British government officials on a visit to help improve customs services in the restive province were wounded in a suicide attack close to the city center.

Last Wednesday, a suicide bomber and a child were killed when the man detonated explosives in a car near a convoy of Canadian forces near the airport.

Suicide attacks have been rare in Afghanistan compared to those against U.S.-led and Iraqi forces in Iraq, but the Taliban say a number of their "devotees" have infiltrated major cities for suicide missions.

S. Asia Quake Hits Area Where Osama Hides

Washington (AP) - No evidence suggests that the deadly earthquake that rocked Pakistan on Saturday injured or killed the world's top terror leader, Osama bin Laden.

The quake shook the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where bin Laden is believed to be hiding. However, authorities at this point have no information indicating he's been injured or killed, said a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the information's sensitivity.

Bin Laden guided the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks aimed at New York City and Washington. U.S. hopes for bin Laden's death or capture were high in December 2001, when U.S. and Afghan troops surrounded a cave complex sheltering al-Qaida members in Afghanistan's Tora Bora region. But bin Laden escaped and is now believed to be living a relatively isolated existence to evade capture.

He was last seen publicly on a videotaped message before the November 2004 elections. Bin Laden's public face is often his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, who may be hiding with him and is known for more frequent messages. In one last month, Zawahri called the London transit attacks "a slap to the face" of Britain.

Remember Afghanistan? Commentary Los Angeles Times / October 9, 2005

By Neamat Nojumi, Neamat Nojumi, a senior fellow at the Center for World Religion, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, was an Afghan military commander during the anti-Soviet war in the 1980s.

AFGHANISTAN'S impressive achievements are in danger of being lost. Donor nations aren't giving enough development funds. Western nongovernmental organizations are mismanaging reconstruction. And Pakistan has failed to arrest Al Qaeda and Taliban militants in its backyard. The optimism and hope generated by last October's presidential election and last month's legislative voting will soon fade. Afghanistan could again become a base for global Islamist terrorism.

Four years after the U.S.-led coalition kicked the Taliban out of power, Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants continue to use Pakistan as a sanctuary, training base and staging area for attacks on coalition and Afghan soldiers. More than 50 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Afghans have been killed this year. Reconstruction is stalled in Afghanistan's border provinces because of a lack of security. Last year, groups of five to 10 engaged in the cross-border attacks from Pakistan, according to tribal elders I met in eastern Nuristan province. This year, the attackers number in the 70s and 80s and often wear uniforms.

Despite Pakistani military operations in Waziristan, periodic arrests of militants and announcements that the border has been "sealed," Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and his generals still play both fireman and arsonist in Afghanistan. This will only worsen unless President Bush and Congress stop indulging Pakistan's two-track policy.

The great majority of Afghans I've spoken with believe that the promises of reconstruction assistance from the Afghan government and the international community remain unfulfilled. Several major roads have been built, and many schools have reopened. But four years into reconstruction, most of Kabul lacks electricity, the capital's streets are unpaved and the sewer and water systems don't work.

The lack of reconstruction programs is most evident in Afghanistan's rural areas. A doctor in the Guzara district of Herat province told me that many pregnant women die on their way to hospitals because they lack transportation or the roads are impassable. More than $5 billion in reconstruction aid has not bought one new power plant, even though electricity is a crucial ingredient in agricultural and industrial development. Opium production is at unacceptably high levels, with terrorist groups and warlords reaping large profits trafficking drugs. Corruption is on the rise.

A big part of the problem is the more than 1,000 Western nongovernmental organizations that receive and channel the aid. Too often they perform governmental functions that elected but under-sourced Afghans should be doing. Maintaining the maze of foreign NGOs is also wasteful. Their logistics, personnel, housing and other internal costs eat up more than 60% of the assistance money (some estimates are as high as 80%). Afghans joke that they suffered under the Soviets, then the Taliban and now the NGOs.

Afghanistan's governing institutions remain too weak to be effective. Little progress has been made in preparing Afghans to govern. Afghan judges and legal experts repeatedly told me that resolving the huge upsurge in property disputes left over from 20 years of war is beyond the judiciary's ability.

In judicial as well as other governmental and administrative areas, aid agencies are not devoting sufficient attention to training and deploying a professional Afghan cadre of managers and skilled civil servants essential to administering the country. Weak democratic institutions and an inadequate civil society undercut President Hamid Karzai's ability to deal with Muslim extremists and warlords.

What's to be done? First and foremost, the United States, bilateral donors and the United Nations must investigate and eliminate the inefficiency and mismanagement rampant within the NGO-administered reconstruction. Government functions performed by non-Afghans should be transferred to Afghan institutions, both public and private, as expeditiously as possible.

To reduce corruption, donors should demand more accountability from the Karzai government. When the new Afghan parliament convenes, it will target this corruption. Karzai would be wise to fire some ministers and implement anti-corruption regulations before that day.

Friends of Afghanistan need to recognize that the successful September legislative elections didn't make the country a functioning nation-state. Continued progress doesn't depend on more foreign troops, but on a smarter, redirected and better-funded reconstruction strategy.

Crumbling schools show shortfall of Afghan aid by U.S. ) Cox News 10/09/2005 By Margaret Coker, Anne Usher

SHOWKHEI — Most mornings, boys from this village walk to a mud-brick school constructed two years ago, compliments of U.S. taxpayers. But the building is in disrepair already, its walls crumbling and its roof pitted by termites chewing into untreated wooden beams.

Village elders in Showkhei, about 20 miles from the main U.S. military base at Bagram, were unanimous in the summer of 2003 when soldiers arrived and asked what they needed: a bigger school. The soldiers sent a construction firm called Ahmad Jamil Construction to Showkhei to double the size of the existing school from five rooms to 10.

But no one from the military came back to inspect the quality of materials or the company's work, villagers said. The next time they saw the soldiers was weeks later at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. U.S. officials took pictures of the new building and left, school Principal Said Rakhman said.

Two years and $20,000 later, the locally made mud bricks crumble to the touch, and termites have infested the beams, leaving villagers with the morbid pastime of guessing when the ceiling will fall.

"Do they just care about photographs?" Rakhman asked. "My children have to stay in this building, their children don't." Use of inferior construction materials is just one of myriad complaints lodged by auditors and aid workers who are critical of U.S. efforts to rebuild Afghanistan.

Four years after American forces invaded Afghanistan to purge the Taliban, the United States has spent more than $1.62 billion to reconstruct this war-ravaged Central Asian country.

Some vital and visible results of the U.S. intervention are evident. After 25 years of open warfare, millions of Afghans have returned home, voters have elected a government and many women are back at work.

But a report published in July by the U.S. Government Accountability Office cited bureaucratic squabbles, poor planning and lack of coordination and oversight in the spending of U.S. reconstruction money in Afghanistan. The effect is that building and public works projects by the State Department and the Pentagon have had little impact on improving the country's long-term reconstruction, the GAO said.

For Afghans this is cause for despair. In a country ranked among the worst in terms of poverty, literacy and infant mortality, the slow reconstruction endangers short- and long-term stability.

Wavering commitment seen - No one expected bomb-scarred, medieval Afghanistan to be transformed into a modern nation overnight. But analysts, aid workers and many Afghans are questioning how effectively the millions of U.S. dollars meant to improve the country have been spent so far.

"You say time equals money. In this case it's true. We Afghans don't have the luxury of time," said Mohammed Sidiq Patman, the deputy minster of education. "I know that America has a desire to help, but (the U.S. government isn't) doing things in the best way."

The government of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai, still heavily dependant on international assistance, is being further undermined by more frequent and deadly attacks by the Taliban and other insurgents. The continued presence of warlords means the authority of the central government doesn't stretch much beyond the confines of the capital, Kabul.

Despite pledges by President Bush to stay the course, the United States is reportedly planning to pull out 20 percent of its 18,000 troops next year.

Quayum Karzai, a brother of the president who was just elected to parliament, said withdrawing even 50 U.S. troops would send a signal to ordinary Afghans and extremists alike that "the commitment isn't there."

In the effort to deliver roads, schools, clinics, irrigation canals and other public works, U.S. agencies fell short of most of their own targets and misrepresented their progress to decision-makers in Washington, according to the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress whose July report covered reconstruction results through May.

For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development has pointed to the repair and construction of miles of irrigation ditches and canals as a reflection of booming Afghan farms. But the GAO found that the contractor responsible for overseeing these projects did not collect or report information on their progress. More important, U.S. efforts weren't steered with the aim of helping Afghans produce specific crops or getting those crops to market.

While a Kabul-to-Kandahar highway is nearing completion, cutting travel time from three days to six hours, relatively little attention has been paid to fixing or building smaller roadways, so moving crops — or people, money or even the Afghan army — around the country remains difficult.

"People told us, I hear there's a clinic, but I can't get to it," said Morgan Courtney, a researcher for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan Washington-based policy group. She conducted an independent survey this year of reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. The clinic may be only a mile or two away, but "they say, the roads are so bad that if we carry our family on a cart, we'll dump it on the way there because its way too bumpy for us."

The handful of health clinics built last year weren't placed where trained doctors are because contractors didn't consult with local officials or the Ministry of Health, which wanted to ensure that they were being put in places of need, the GAO reported.

Peggy O'Ban, a USAID spokeswoman, said the agency agrees with the GAO's assertions and notes that a comprehensive strategy for reconstruction in Afghanistan, lacking until this past summer, is now in place.

"It would've been a lot easier to import people (workers) from abroad, but — depending on project and level of skill — what you're trying to do is train people," she said. "But if the imperative is to get everything done as quickly as possible, that creates a challenge."

Improving primary education — by building schools, revamping inadequate curriculums and training teachers — is a goal embraced by all international agencies working in Afghanistan. Yet some of the U.S. government's most abysmal reconstruction results came in education.

Since 2002, 3,500 schools have been refurbished or built from scratch. For all Afghan children to study in covered buildings instead of tents or open-air schools, however, another 2,000 schools will need to be built, according the Ministry of Education. The U.S. government has paid for a relatively small number of these needed school projects.

USAID had projected that it would refurbish or build 286 schools by the end of last year, but its contractors had only completed eight by that deadline and refurbished about 77 others, with a coat of paint sometimes counting as a refinished school, the GAO reported.

As of Sept. 1 of this year, according to USAID, its contractors had completed 314 school projects since reconstruction began after the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

By contrast, in the village of Jamal Agha, residents call the recently built girls school a castle. With electricity and computers, it was constructed with private U.S. money.

USAID officials say its lackluster performance was largely a result of being initially too optimistic about Afghanistan's political and security climate. Many areas of the Texas-sized country are still considered too unsafe for humanitarian workers.

Some builders shunned risk - Deteriorating security played a major role in slowing or shelving plans in at least six of the country's provinces, mainly along the Pakistani border, officials said. They blamed a lack of contractors willing to work in risky areas for allocating only $6 million of its $49 million budget for schools and clinics in fiscal 2003.

Eighty-one aid workers were killed last year, the GAO reported, and attacks by the Taliban and its sympathizers left more than 1,200 dead in the six months leading up to the Sept. 18 parliamentary election, including U.S. and NATO soldiers, Afghan military and civilians and foreign workers.

U.S. officials also note they had to coordinate their actions with the Ministry of Education, a challenge considering the Afghan government didn't have pens, desks or computers — let alone a working staff — until mid-2002.

"Building the capacity of the new government to deliver is as important as the buildings, and it takes time," said Alonzo Fulgham, the USAID mission director in Afghanistan.

Under the same difficult conditions, however, nonprofits and international lending agencies such as the World Bank have demonstrated better results.

Atlanta-based CARE International, which has worked in Afghanistan for 44 years, built 40 schools last year, which in most cases cost $10,000 to $20,000 less than U.S.-sponsored projects. Schools constructed by USAID contractors cost between $60,000 and $80,000. CARE's faster pace was possible in part because it already had relationships with Afghan villages and businesses. U.S. government agencies also have been hindered by bureaucratic battles not faced by the private aid organizations.

USAID, a branch of the State Department and the main American aid agency, had to make room for the Defense Department's new role in reconstruction, which has been expanded since the Sept. 11 attacks. USAID still has the lion's share of the aid budget for Afghanistan, about 83 percent.

Both agencies had to hammer out a philosophy of aid work acceptable to military and civilian staff. By last year, the two U.S. agencies — partly at the urging of Afghans — worked out a cooperative effort using groups known as provincial reconstruction teams. By design, these small teams of U.S. workers, led by armed soldiers, are based in rural districts, placing them well to evaluate and fulfill the needs of residents.

But shuffling personnel in and out of the teams, often under pressure to show quick progress, sometimes led to overlapping efforts, according to Courtney of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Often, outside aid agencies weren't consulted. In one town, for instance, the team built one school, while on the other end of town a private aid group financed construction of another. This was occurring as many Afghan districts remained without any educational facilities.

While U.S. officials say they have improved coordination, a lack of contractor oversight continues to plague American-financed projects. In some cases, U.S. officials have not been able to identify where their projects were located, nor have they kept credible records of contractor work, the GAO report said.
"Projects are expensive, but they're not following up on them," said a U.S. official who formerly worked in Afghanistan, adding that "it's entirely up to the goodwill of the contractor" to make sure the work has been done right, especially since most Afghans lack technical expertise. Analysts and some aid workers say that earlier in the reconstruction effort the U.S. government put too much emphasis on numbers — putting the quantity of reconstruction projects above the quality of the work — that hindered progress.

"Eight hundred schools does not mean you have education," said Suraya Sadeed, the Afghan-American founder of Help the Afghan Children, a Virginia-based nonprofit organization. Schools await staff, books

Fulgham, the USAID mission director in Afghanistan, says the agency is not only building schools but training teachers and printing schoolbooks, initiatives that he contends have yielded significant results.

But some USAID contracts to build schools do not obligate the contracting company responsible for construction to also equip the building with desks, blackboards or other educational necessities, a task USAID said falls under the Afghan Ministry of Education.

Dozens of U.S.-built schools, lacking trained teachers, books or even drinking water, sit empty, Sadeed said.

Sadeed's organization provided the technical assistance for construction and added money to attract good teachers and run a generator that provides electricity to a computer lab. "You can't do nation-building and have it crumble," she said.

Afghanistan Four Years On - Inter Press Service 10/08/2005 By Jim Lobe

Washington - On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the launch of U.S. military operations against the Taliban regime, Afghanistan presents a mixed picture, according to experts here.

The relative stability of the government of President Hamid Karzai and last month's successful voting for national and regional legislatures offer grounds for some satisfaction on the part of U.S. policymakers.

But independent analysts say the country remains overwhelmingly dependent on external aid and threatened by a host of problems, from a revived Taliban insurgency to an indigenous economy based largely on the illicit drug trade.

Training programmes for the national army and the police have lagged far behind schedule, leaving vast swathes of the countryside under the control of local warlords, while the death toll for both civilians and U.S. troops killed by Taliban forces and those of their chief ally, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has mushroomed since last spring.

Indeed, 86 U.S. soldiers have been killed so far this year -- compared to 55 killed between Oct. 7, 2001, when Washington began operations to oust the Taliban, and the end of 2002. More than 1,200 people were killed in just the first six months of this year, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG).

"The war in Afghanistan is coming to a tempo that wasn't expected," said Michael Scheuer, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official who led its efforts to track al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan from the late 1990s, and author of "Imperial Hubris".

Others have noted that insurgent attacks have become increasingly sophisticated in the past year, amid evidence that radical Islamists who have fought U.S. forces in Iraq have brought equipment, expertise and the knowledge they acquired there to Afghanistan.

Even the elections marked something of a disappointment to observers who had hoped for a turnout approaching the 70 percent of eligible voters who voted in last year's presidential elections.

In the event, only about 53 percent of the electorate cast ballots this time. Those who received the most votes in the most secure parts of the country, such as Ramyan Bachardost in Kabul, ran populist campaigns in which they mainly attacked corruption and waste in international aid and reconstruction, according to New York University analyst Barnett Rubin.

Rubin, along with Scheuer and several other experts, spoke at a forum to assess Afghanistan's progress sponsored by George Washington University and the Centre for American Progress (CAP) here Wednesday.

Indeed, despite galloping growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) since the interim government headed by Karzai was set up as a result of the December 2001 Bonn Accord, and a huge boost in school enrollments, particularly for girls, the plight of most people in the countryside remains tenuous. Afghanistan still ranks among the half-dozen poorest countries in the world, and, according to a State Department report published in July, has the highest level of malnutrition in the world at 70 percent.

What economic activity is not linked to the international aid effort, according to the experts, is related to the drug trade which, along with along with corruption (also often linked to drugs), was cited by Karzai himself last month as the country's biggest problem. The U.N.'s drug agency estimated earlier this year that the cultivation and trafficking of opium accounted for 60 percent of the economy, or over 2.8 billion dollars in value.

In another report published last year, the State Department warned that Afghanistan was "on the verge of becoming a narcotics state", accounting for nearly 90 percent of the world's opium production. While production fell declined slightly in 2005, according to a recent U.N. report, Afghanistan has in the past year moved into actual heroin production.

The degree to which the country depends so heavily on the drug trade has created a serious bind for the U.S. and other international donors, according to Rubin, who advised the U.N. leadership at the Bonn meetings.

"You can't have a nation-building policy on the one hand and a policy to kill off a major sector of the economy on the other," he said, noting that poppy cultivation has now spread to all of Afghanistan's provinces and "there is no sign of a comprehensive development strategy ...to build an economy that is legal."

Amb. James Dobbins, a top analyst at the RAND Corporation who represented the U.S. at the 2001 Bonn talks, echoed that assessment. "I don't see a near-term strategy" to substantially reduce the economy's reliance on the drug trade, he said.

Any effort to eradicate poppies at this point will not only further impoverish the countryside, but also widen the growing disconnect between the government in Kabul and the rest of the country, according to Rubin. He noted that contributing to that disconnect and growing sense of alienation is a "big institutional gap" between local, grassroots groups, most of which are organised around the mosque, and the central government.

Indeed, the fact that the country's Muslim clergy, which have a national network that can mobilise the populace in ways that the central and local governments cannot, still have not reached a consensus on the legitimacy of the government constitutes another serious vulnerability to the U.S.-backed regime, said Rubin.

Another problem is its incoherence, according to Nazif Sharani, an Afghan-born anthropologist at Indiana University, who noted that the country has really "ended up with three or four governments", including the U.N. office in Kabul, the U.S. embassy there, international non-governmental organisations that administer most of the international aid, the Karzai government, "and now, the fifth, the parliament", which he described as a hodge-podge of conflicting ideologies and interests.

The U.S. and the rest of the international community, he said, had made a serious error in trying to build up the central government, particularly the army and police, to which nearly half the government's budget is now devoted, at the expense of the local autonomy and empowerment. "This government will continue not because it is supported by the people," Sharani said, "but because they fear the return of the Taliban."

Another major mistake made by the U.S. in particular was to divert "resources that could or should have been used in Afghanistan" to prepare for war in Iraq, according to Dobbins, who gave some credit to the administration for increasing its commitment to Afghanistan since then. "We have about two times as many troops there now (nearly 20,000) as we did in the first year and are providing four times more assistance," he said.

Rice to shirk democracy pressure in Central Asia

WASHINGTON – The Dawn, Oct 9: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will this week refrain from pressing Central Asian governments for speedy democratic change out of fear of alienating military dictators in an unstable but oil-rich region.

Rice will make her first trip as the top US diplomat to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, where pro-democracy rhetoric sends shivers through the hard-line governments after ousters in recent years of autocrats in other ex-Soviet states.

Washington vowed this year to make democracy-building central to bilateral relations, but if it presses too hard in Central Asia it risks losing influence to Russia and China, which make no such demands, according to political analysts.

At stake is sway over a region that is a narcotics crossroads, a vital launching pad for the US campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and home to some of the world’s largest oil finds in recent decades.

The State Department’s top diplomat for the region, Daniel Fried, defended Rice’s planned caution saying the United States was realistic about how quickly it could prompt change and has decided not to criticize every anti-democratic move it sees. The governments have also told the United States to “lay off” prodding them on democracy, he said.

“The art of diplomacy and foreign policymaking is taking your principles, sticking to them, but applying them in the real world in ways that make sense,” he told reporters in a preview of a trip that will also include Afghanistan, and possibly France and Britain.

“That’s easy to say and it’s very hard to do. You have to be realistic enough to distinguish between what you want in the end and what you see on the ground as possible in any given year and on any given day,” he said, adding that US military, economic and democracy interests were indivisible.

The State Department has been vocal this year in other regions, insisting Latin American leaders govern democratically and prodding Arab allies to open their political systems. But it has been largely mute on Central Asia.

Last week, a day after Rice’s trip was announced, an opposition leader was jailed in Tajikistan, in a move that eliminated from next year’s elections a top rival to the long-standing leader Imomali Rakhmonov.

The State Department has refused to condemn the move in a country that allows Washington to fly missions through its airspace into Afghanistan. And when the United States has spoken out, it has paid a price.

After troops in Uzbekistan massacred protesters this year, Washington — albeit less forcefully than other Western powers — called for an inquiry. In response, President Islam Karimov ejected the United States from an air base used against the Taliban.

Fried flew to Uzbekistan for talks on the base and Karimov “all but slammed the door in his face,” according to a State Department official briefed on the meeting. Unlikely to achieve much with Karimov, Rice has omitted Uzbekistan from her schedule, Fried said.

Robert Templer, of the International Crisis Group, whose goal is to prevent conflicts worldwide, said the United States has a “half-hearted commitment to democracy” in Central Asia to protect its ties with governments that are weak and paranoid Washington wants their ouster.

But Kimberly Marten, a political science professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, said too much pressure for full democracies would be counterproductive and further destabilize a region.—Reuters

Afghan Fragments - The Washington Post 10/09/2005 By Peter Baker

GARDEZ - The last time I saw Hakim Taniwal, I thought he was a dead man walking. A slight, aging sociology professor with gentle manners, Taniwal returned to his homeland from exile in Australia after the fall of the Taliban to help build a new Afghanistan. When I ran across him in the spring of 2002, he had been dispatched by Hamid Karzai, the new Afghan president, to the untamed frontier to take over as governor and dislodge a brutal local warlord who ruled over these parts. Taniwal had no guns, no army and seemingly no chance. It seemed like a suicide mission.

When I saw him again here two weeks ago, he was sitting in the provincial governor's office and the warlord was somewhere in the countryside, out of power, his militia largely disbanded. I reminded Taniwal of our first meeting, when he could not even get into the governor's house because it was occupied by the warlord's family and dozens of his thuggish guerrillas, bristling with Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers.

Taniwal looked at me and smiled. "Things have changed," he said with satisfaction. Indeed they have -- and yet, in so many ways they haven't.

Four years ago this weekend, the United States launched its war to topple the Taliban. Along with my wife and fellow correspondent, Susan Glasser, I spent eight months shuttling in and out of Afghanistan to cover the conflict and its aftermath. At the end of last month, I returned to cover a trip by President Bush's national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

Most Americans could be forgiven if they've forgotten that we are still heavily engaged in Afghanistan, overshadowed as it has been by the turmoil in Iraq and the devastation back home along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But amid a continuing low-grade war against resurgent Taliban forces and the fruitless search for Osama bin Laden, an audacious experiment in nation-building is underway. The final results of the experiment are not in, but they will carry vital lessons for the reach and limits of American power in a new era.

The Bush administration would love to portray Afghanistan as the picture of progress, and there are certainly encouraging, even inspiring developments. Compared to the daily horrors in Iraq, Afghanistan seems a model of stability to many U.S. officials. "Coming here from Iraq, this is like a vacation," said a State Department official who has worked on reconstruction in both places.

At the same time, even the most optimistic Americans here acknowledge that the job of stabilizing Afghanistan is nowhere near finished, and they worry that it might come unraveled again if a distracted Washington averts its attention too soon. It is not easy to wrench a collection of disparate city-states out of the Middle Ages and turn them into a unified, democratic 21st-century nation in four short years. "What we have taken on is to try to create a state that has never really existed," said a U.S. diplomat here. "It isn't going to happen quickly. You've bit it off and now you've got to chew it for a long time."

Taniwal offers a telling case study of the contrasts behind every corner in Afghanistan. Against all odds, through peaceful perseverence he outlasted warlord Bacha Khan in his home city of Khost, from which the ruthless commander lorded over three provinces. But now based in the town of Gardez as governor of one of those provinces, Taniwal presides over a rugged area south of the capital Kabul with precious few tools. He welcomes visitors into an office with no electricity except for the couple of hours when his small old generator runs each evening. The World Bank gave him a powerful new 480-kilowatt generator, but it has sat unused behind his office for the past year because his government has no money to pay for the fuel to run it.

"The needs are very big in Afghanistan," Taniwal observed. "When I want to build something, I'm not able to do it."

The hardscrabble town of Gardez, located near the site of Operation Anaconda, the largest battle of the U.S. war, remains a primitive collection of rundown buildings and crude market stalls. Yet just outside of town, the Americans have helped build a new Afghan army base and a police training facility with modular buildings. The Afghan soldiers who were still wearing plastic sandals and traditional shalwar kameez outfits -- knee-length shirts and baggy pants -- when I left in 2002 are now outfitted in professional uniforms and boots. And dozens of new two- and three-story buildings are being put up by Afghan businessmen north of town, a cluster being called New Gardez.

A day spent driving around Kabul about 80 miles to the north offers a similar clash of impressions. Thecapital seems more sprawling than ever, teeming with millions of Afghans who have returned home from abroad. The number of cars has multiplied so much that the streets are jammed with traffic all day long. A city that once offered little more to eat than lamb kebabs, rice pilau and mantu dumplings now boasts Chinese, Thai, Italian, Indian and French restaurants.

Construction litters the landscape. Both the Americans and the Iranians are building university campuses. Most stunning, perhaps, is the handful of gleaming new glass buildings. Putting up a structure made of glass amounts to a mind-boggling act of optimism in a city where not long ago nearly every windowpane was shattered by years of rocket attacks.

When I arrived in Kabul for the first time in late 2001, I stayed at the old Intercontinental Hotel, a shell of its former self, pockmarked by war. I slept in a room with sporadic power, no heat, no running water, no showers, no working toilets, no telephones, no Internet and certainly no room service. Just two weeks before I returned to Kabul last month, the nine-story-tall Safi Landmark Hotel and Suites opened its sliding glass doors; it features every modern convenience, including a health club, satellite television and minibars.

Attached to the hotel is a snazzy new shopping mall, the Kabul City Centre,complete with escalators and glass elevators. I watched as a woman in a burqa figuring out the concept of an escalator approached a normal staircase and waited as if expecting it to move up and down as well. The atrium offers a coffee bar. The first floor is packed with stores selling mobile telephones in a city that a few years ago had practically no working land lines. The next floor up has all the jewelry stores. The whole mall seems so out of place in Kabul that locals wryly call it "Dubai" after the oil-rich emirate that is a shopping paradise for rich Afghans.

At the same time, such glaring symbols of change and foreign investment have little to do with the vast majority of Afghans, who are unable to avail themselves of such pricey creature comforts. A single night at the Safi hotel costs $200 to $350, more than many Afghans earn in a year.

Most Afghans still grind out the same subsistence lives they did under the Taliban, living in mud houses, growing their own food, maybe selling soap or shoes in the bazaar. Poppy harvesting and the drug trafficking it spawns still account for roughly half of the Afghan economy. Corruption is endemic. Many women in Kabul have finally shed theirburqas in favor of simple head scarves; nonetheless, more than half of the women I saw on the streets there and virtually all of those I saw outside the capital remained fully covered.

In fact, beyond the hotel and mall, most of Kabul looks no different than it did under the Taliban, a sometimes apocalyptic streetscape. The crumbled sections of town laid waste by fratricidal shelling between warlords in the 1990s are still little more than rubble. The road to the old bombed-out Darulaman Palace offers a tour through the wreckage of decades of war and strife. The thousands of refugees who once took shelter in the cratered old Soviet embassy have been relocated, but the embassy is still in ruins.

If there is a symbol of hope for the future here, it lies not within the glass shell of a new hotel but rather at the end of the road to the demolished palace, where Omar Sultan and Omara Khan Massoudi have been laboring to restore the nearby National Museum of Afghanistan.

Established in 1919, the venerable museum was shelled and looted repeatedly from 1992 to 1995. Then it was ravaged in 2001 by the Taliban, who destroyed 2,500 objects, particularly statues that were deemed heretical because they were graven images of people. Fortunately, the museum's stalwarts spirited away some of the most valuable items, including the fabled gold of the ancient kingdom of Bactria.

Today, thanks to the efforts of people like Sultan and Massoudi, the building has been patched up and repainted, and the remaining art put back on display. For them, it is a labor to save their country. Sultan, an archaeologist by training and civil engineer by profession, returned to Afghanistan after 26 years in the United States, giving up his pension from the North Carolina transportation department to become deputy culture minister. "We have to rebuild our culture," he told me.

Sultan represents an inspiring cohort of the Afghan diaspora that has returned home to try to make a difference. At a small party one evening, he introduced me to his cousin and a friend; both women had moved back from California to try to teach their Afghan sisters how to start their own businesses. One of the women had fled Afghanistan in the 1970s hidden in a shipping container with her tranquilized 3 1/2 -month-old child, while her husband escaped rolled up in a carpet. That such people would ever return represents an act of faith in the future.

Still, what I saw of Afghanistan during my visit struck me like the Restoration Room at the museum, where workers sifted through thousands of pieces of destroyed statues in hopes of reassembling as many as possible. They had no photographs, no models for how the pieces fit together or what the image would look like when they were done. They just kept trying different combinations in a trial-and-error fashion until they found two pieces that went together. Then they picked up some more fragments of their shattered country and tried to piece them together again, too.

Afghan Opium Production Resists Eradication - ABC News 10/09/2005 By Charlotte Sector - Snuffing Out Cash Crop Requires Fighting Corruption Along With International Efforts

Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan fell this year but opium production barely budged, making the rugged mountain nation once again world's largest heroin purveyor, despite national and international efforts to curtail the drug's spread.

Nipping Afghanistan's opium problem in the bud thus far has meant targeting poppy farmers, but the root of the problem lies beyond the fields and within Afghanistan's government, say experts.

The problems are manifold. The heroin industry puts many Afghans at the mercy of narco-traffickers, and Russia and Europe are grappling with skyrocketing heroin use, which has fueled a rise in HIV cases.

In the last few years, the refining of opium into morphine and heroin has shifted within Afghanistan, signaling that organized crime has implanted itself, with opium profits now believed to be fueling the insurgency and international terrorist groups.

The Afghan government and international community have grappled unsuccessfully with the problem, but one think tank suggests that the answer is as simple as allowing poppy farmers to grow the plant legally for sale to pharmaceutical companies, rather than attempting to eradicate the crop.

Cultivation Down but Production Still Going Strong ) Harsh winters can wreck a promising harvest. Not so for the Afghanistan opium crop, which after years of drought, flourished with the heavy rainfall and snow last winter and spring. Production fell 2.4 percent to 4,200 tons in 2005 compared to a year before. Despite the slight drop, 87 percent of the world's opium comes from Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 2005 Afghan Opium Survey.

The UNODC and Afghan President Hamid Karzai are touting that this remains well below the 1999 peak under the Taliban and that eradication efforts have curtailed overall cultivation. Beginning in October 2004, Afghanistan ordered provincial governors to destroy poppy fields and dispatched national police on a slash and burn mission. The threat of having poppy fields wrecked by drug enforcement authorities convinced farmers not to plant poppies. In return for opting not to plant the crimson-colored cash crop, farmers are promised aid and assistance.

The efforts seemed to have paid off in targeted provinces. Cultivation — the number of acres planted with poppies — dropped by 21 percent with the "poppy basket" region of Nangarhar seeing a 96 percent drop in cultivation.

"This year, we saw how well the stick and carrot approach really works," said Antonio Maria Costa, UNODC executive director, at a presentation of the UNODC survey in Russia at the end of September.
Karzai has repeated that he hopes his war-battered country will rid itself entirely of poppies within five to 10 years. Optimistic, yes. Realistic? Many doubt the country can achieve such lofty goals.

As encouraging as the numbers may be, CARE's Afghanistan Advocacy Coordinator Scott Braunschweig, questions the sustainability of the eradication efforts.

"These are short-term means to obtain a short-term reduction," he said in an e-mail from Kabul. "The decreases have negatively affected many farmers' livelihoods and potentially weakened state development," said Braunschweig.

In his opinion, tying development assistance to reductions in poppy cultivation undermines long-term, sustainable improvements because inevitably both sides feel like neither is living up to its end of the bargain.

In provinces where poppy cultivation has fallen dramatically, farmers voiced anger and disappointment about promises for roads, irrigation systems and jobs never materializing. A farmer told a CARE employee that if assistance didn't come he would plant poppies again next year, according to a March Afghanistan policy brief by CARE and the Center on International Cooperation.

The United Nations is aware that money and assistance hasn't reached all the farmers and cites security concerns and lack of staffing.

Cautiously Optimistic - The UNODC acknowledges that the recent progress is tenuous considering that opium cultivation has shifted away from the center and the east of the country to the north and west.
"We have to assist those who obey better," said Thomas Pietschmann, a UNODC research officer, saying that it's hard to convince a farmer to grow wheat when he can make 10 times more planting poppies. Pietschmann explained that at first the incentive program didn't work in Pakistan, but that after a while, the benefits convinced farmers to choose legality over illegality.

Afghanistan ranks among the poorest countries in the world and wiping away a very profitable income source — the drug trade accounted for 52 percent of its gross domestic product — doesn't happen overnight.

Even if farmers only reap 3 percent to 4 percent of the $2.7 billion illicit drug money, opium remains their only mode of survival, experts say. Afghans need another cash source for at least two to three years as an alternative crop grows and bears fruit.

Let 'Em Grow It for Medicine - Observing the impasse, the international drug policy think tank Senlis Council believes that licensing opium production would allow Afghans a perfect transition toward legal means of surviving by cutting out the middle man and putting an end to the growing drug mafia controlled state.

"You allow farmers to maintain a livelihood by still letting them grow their cash crop, which then allows them to diversify into roses, wheat and other activities," said Emmanuel Reinert, Senlis' executive director. "If you remove their livelihood, it's a serious way to push them [the farmers] into a criminal network thus recreating the conditions which led to the Taliban coming to power."

The council, which just wrapped up a three-day symposium in Kabul, proposed that the state control opium production so it can be sold for medicinal purposes. Opium-based morphine and codeine are highly effective painkillers. France, Australia, India and Turkey run successful licensed opium systems, said Reinert, reiterating that his group advocates working with what's available and "turning something bad into something good."

"We're not saying keep growing poppies, we're just saying you can ease the pressure and do something different," he said. In his view a licensing system will bring rule of law to the country and allow Afghanistan to take responsibility for their reconstruction and development.

Fighting the Addiction - Apparently the Afghan government hasn't been swayed. The government welcomed the study but said that it was too early to implement such a plan, blaming insecurity and instability.

"The Senlis proposals are attractive at a superficial level," said Paul Barker, CARE Afghanistan country director via e-mail from Kabul. "A licensing regime for poppy production could only work in a country with a well functioning judicial and security system."

Not only does Afghanistan lack consistent rule of law, the UNODC also fears that legalizing opium production would send the wrong message to farmers and worsen the problem by giving everyone a reason to grow poppies. Pietschmann added that India has fallen on hard times because legalizing opium production automatically drives prices lower.

The UNODC realizes that it takes more than counter-narcotics efforts to fight drugs. It has asked that along with the eradication and persuasion campaign, Afghanistan must address corruption within its own government and remove (not just reprimand) corrupt governors. In addition, they advise a zero-tolerance policy toward militias and warlords involved in drugs. Finally, the UNODC recommends Afghanistan must prosecute and extradite drug traffickers.

Afghanistan's government bears the brunt of the dirty work but so does the Western world, according to the United Nations. That means pouring more money, not less, into development, having NATO control Afghanistan's borders and break the drug chain abroad. Snuff out heroin labs, clamp down on illegal drug money bank accounts and dissuade drug users from shooting up.

Failed invasion of Afghanistan turned into a triumph for Russia's film industry - Sunday Herald, UK 10/09/2005 By Andrew Osborn in Moscow

HUMILIATED and impoverished at the hands of Hollywood's movie moguls, Russia's film industry has sealed its renaissance with a multi-million pound blockbuster about one of the country's most painful events of modern times: the Soviet Union's failed invasion of Afghanistan. The film – 9th Company – is already being hailed as a Russian equivalent of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket or Oliver Stone's Platoon. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the superpower's painful withdrawal in 1989 is to Russians what Vietnam is to Americans.

Up to 15,000 Soviet troops died in the conflict, along with around one million Afghans, and for Russians, defeat at the hands of the US-backed mujahidin was a bitter reminder that the once-mighty USSR was no longer a force to be reckoned with.

The failure marked the country's slide into chaos, heralded the superpower's disintegration and gave the Russian Army a taste of what was to come in Chechnya.

Few Russian directors have dared tackle the subject up until now because of its sensitivity, but Fyodor Bondarchuk, son of famous Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk, has changed all that.

In its first week on general release in Russia, more than two million people flocked to see 9th Company, and it grossed almost $10 million, a record for any modern Russian film.

Shot with the biggest ever budget for a Russian movie ($9m), it enjoyed an advertising budget of $3.5m, which was enough to cover most of Moscow in posters featuring the film's tragic heroes.

Based on real events, it tells the story of a company of soldiers ordered to take and secure a barren Afghan hilltop called "Height 3234" so that a military convoy can safely pass below.

In the film, the company finds itself overwhelmed by Afghan fighters and, in the bitter gun battle that follows, all but one of the Russians die. The episode starkly underlines the futility of the conflict and of war in general.

In one of the final scenes, the sole survivor, a soldier nicknamed "Fierce", is told by a relief force which arrives too late that the Soviet Union is withdrawing from the country, that the convoy his dead comrades were supposed to be safeguarding is not passing that way anymore, and that they couldn't get the message through earlier because the radio wasn't working.

The final line in the film from "Fierce" rings hollow: "We, the lads of Company 9, we won our war. We were victorious."

Veterans of the conflict have given the film their guarded approval, though some have questioned its historical accuracy, arguing that the events in question took place two years earlier and that more than one soldier survived the ensuing bloodbath.

But what is perhaps more significant is that a film which dwells on one of Russia's most painful military defeats is so popular in a country that has traditionally embraced feel-good patriotic films – and that such a production represents the Russian film industry's renaissance after at least a decade of turmoil and humiliation.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Moscow acknowledged it had lost the cold war, its once-prolific film industry also collapsed.

Hundreds of cinemas shut down or were converted into nightclubs or casinos; state-run film studios suddenly found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy, and Russians joined the rest of the world in consuming Hollywood fare with a voracious appetite. Many even stopped going to the cinema altogether, buying into the country's burgeoning market in pirate videos and, a while later, DVDs.

Throughout the 1990s, a handful of acclaimed arthouse films were produced, but none of them made it onto general release in the West.

However, 14 years after the Soviet Union's demise, the Russian film industry appears to have got its act together.

The country now boasts more than 800 cinemas (with 300 built in the last year alone) and new multiplex complexes are appearing all the time.

Receipts are also up. Russian films are expected to gross $370m this year and more than $500m next year. A decade ago, that figure was just $8m. Russian productions have also began to edge out Hollywood ones, clawing back about a quarter of the country's market share so far.

And 9th Company is not a one-off – last Friday saw the general release in the UK of a Russian-made fantasy film Night Watch. It depicts a battle between good and evil on the streets of modern-day Moscow, and has taken at least $20m in Russia already.

It has been lauded by Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino and is the first of a trilogy, international distribution rights for which have been bought up by Hollywood.

After years of watching their film industry fall apart at the hands of America's richer, slicker studios, the industry once tightly controlled by Joseph Stalin is finally playing Hollywood at its own game.

[Disclaimer: The content of this news bulletin does not necessarily reflect the view or policy of the Afghan Government, unless specifically stated as such. The collection of articles and commentaries from Afghan and international news sources is provided for informational purposes, and accuracy of the news is the responsibility of the original source.]