In this bulletin:

• Aziz plans crucial visit to Afghanistan
• Pakistan’s tribal deals aren’t working: report
• Pressure Mounts for Expulsion of Taliban
• Security still trumps reconstruction for Afghan elders
• Casualty of war - Afghans would suffer most if Canadian mission ended early
• Afghan trade team to import Pak made diesel engine
• 1,373 miles into the heart of Afghanistan

Aziz plans crucial visit to Afghanistan

Islamabad: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz will visit Afghanistan this week as part of the ongoing effort to mend fences with the country's western neighbour, sources said yesterday.

The two-day visit, likely on Wednesday and Thursday, is expected to focus on strains linked to persistent Afghan government claims of militant activity across the border from Pakistani tribal areas.

A major topic during talks between Aziz and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will certainly be Pakistan's recent decision to mine and fence selected parts of the 2,400km Durand Line frontier to stop any cross-border militant movement.

The Islamabad plan has however been strongly opposed by the Afghan government as an attempt to divide people of the border areas, while UN officials have said that the laying of mines may pose serious threat to human lives.

Pakistan’s tribal deals aren’t working: report

Daily Times Monitor – 1.1.07 - LAHORE: In an effort to deal with the growing terrorist and insurgent sanctuary in Pakistan, government officials have negotiated peace deals with local tribal leaders who have agreed to crack down on militants. But this strategy, which has been supported by some in the United States and Europe, is likely to fail, according to a report in the Herald Tribune.

The strategy has already proved ineffective in halting cross-border activity from Pakistan into Afghanistan. And it is likely to strengthen groups such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda by allowing them to regroup, the report says.

The crux of the problem is straightforward. Afghan insurgent and terrorist groups enjoy a sanctuary in Pakistan that starts from snow-capped Chitral in the north, continues southwest along the Afghan-Pakistan border, and extends to dusty Quetta. The tribal areas pose a particular problem because of the weakness of Pakistan’s government there, allowing militants to use the areas as a base to rest and train in safety and then infiltrate into Afghanistan, the report adds.

Pakistan’s government has negotiated peace deals with pro-Taliban militants in such tribal areas as South and North Waziristan, calling on tribesmen to expel foreign militants and end cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. In return, the Pakistani military promised to end major operations in the areas and pulled most of its soldiers back to military camps.

The logic of the deals seems intuitive. In areas where tribes exert political, military and economic power, the most effective long-term solution is to create incentives for tribal leaders to police their areas. After all, these tribal areas have been ruled indigenously for hundreds of years. And tribes often regard outside forces, including the Pakistani military, as unwelcome foreigners. But there are several problems with this strategy.

First, the tribal deals have failed to curb cross-border activity and undermine the power of the Taliban and other militant groups. NATO officials I have spoken with say insurgents are crossing the border in greater numbers. A former foreign minister, Najmuddin Shaikh, recently acknowledged in a Pakistani newspaper: “There is no doubt that the Waziristan agreement has led to increased Taliban influence.”

Second, the strategy rests on a false assumption that tribes actually control these areas. Insurgents and terrorists like the Taliban have increasingly exerted control in some areas. Third, there is no enforcement mechanism if the tribal deals fail to stop militant forces from crossing the border, the report says.

The Pakistani military has conducted combat operations against foreign fighters — especially Central Asians and Arabs — in the tribal areas. But it has refused to arrest or kill middle- and high-level Taliban officials, and has expressed a deep unwillingness to enter the tribal areas again, the report claims. If tribes fail to expel Taliban militants and end cross-border attacks, Pakistani forces must do it. American and NATO officials need to provide a mixture of pressure and incentives to make this happen.

Pressure Mounts for Expulsion of Taliban

By Nick Allen– Gulf Times 1.1.07

ISLAMABAD: Amid growing US concern that Pakistan has allowed safe havens for Al Qaeda and the Taliban on its territory, a controversial tribal peace deal favouring the militants is coming under fire.

At the end of a year that saw a fierce resurgence of Taliban attacks in neighbouring Afghanistan, US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher named the presence of the militants in the tribal belt by the border as "one of the key items" on Washington’s agenda.

"The Taliban have been able to use these areas for sanctuary and for command and control and regrouping and supply," Pakistani media quoted Boucher as saying this week.

The focus of the criticism is a September 5 treaty between Pakistan’s government and pro-Taliban tribal leaders in North Waziristan, a barren part of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) that for centuries was self-ruled by jirgas, or councils of elders.

Under its terms, the government agreed to abandon military operations and release prisoners in exchange for promises that the militants would cease cross-border attacks into Afghanistan and disarm foreign terrorists in their midst.

The insurgents and government forces ceased hostilities. But the deal’s architect, NWFP governor Lt. General Ali Mohammed Jan Aurakzai, has questioned tribal leaders over continuing infiltration into Afghanistan and the presence of foreign militants.

But the governor is not expected to reverse his stance on the treaty. Concerning the greater conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he said he believes in talking with the militants rather than increasing Nato forces to fight them.

"Bring 50,000 more troops and fight for 10 to 15 years more and you won’t resolve it, Aurakzai recently told British media. "There will be no military solution, there has to be a political solution." Meanwhile, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf insists that no one is striking deals directly with the Taliban, and that the agreement with tribal elders was aimed at isolating the enemy.

"We have to go for a multi-pronged approach of military action against the militants and also wean away the population from getting on their side," he said in the US before meeting President George Bush in September.

But experts doubt there is a clear delineation on the ground.

"When the government engages in a peace deal it makes sure that the militants’ representatives are present along with the tribal elders," said defence analyst Talat Masood, a retired general of the Pakistani army.

US troops patrolling the Afghan border claim the insurgents train, recruit and run armaments and logistics depots in Pakistan and even enjoy the support of Pakistani army units - a charge hotly denied by Islamabad. In the latest step to prove its commitment to sealing infiltration routes, Pakistan’s government announced that it will fence and mine selected stretches of the frontier.

But in the absence of improvements under the peace deal, calls are mounting in the US for action against the militants’ sanctuaries.

"Action must be taken against Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Pakistan before spring, when another major offensive against US and NATO forces can be expected unless the enemy bases and supply lines are disrupted," The Washington Post wrote on December 21.

However, direct US military action may only boost support for the Taliban in the ethnic Pashtun tribal belt, as well as fuel broader resentment towards Musharraf, who is a key ally in the US-led war on terror.

On October 30, a US drone rocketed a Madrassa religious school in the NWFP town of Bajaur, killing more than 80 people. Fearing a backlash, Pakistani authorities took the blame for the attack and denied reports that many civilians died, saying the school was a militant training centre.

Notably, the attack coincided with the planned signing of another peace treaty in South Waziristan. Amid outrage at the Bajaur strike, the agreement was abandoned.

Defence analyst Masood said he did not expect further unilateral action by US or Nato forces in the tribal areas, noting that Islamabad still had useful leverage from the treaty.

"Pakistan’s government is trying to put pressure on the elders and leaders of the militants, that if they do not comply then it would have to revert to the military operation," - DPA

Taliban bomb kills two policemen in Afghanistan

Mon Jan 1, 6:57 AM ET

KABUL (AFP) - A Taliban-planted bomb killed two policemen in western Afghanistan as authorities investigated the killing of two civilians by foreign forces at the weekend.

The government was meanwhile back in control of a district in the west that dozens of Taliban in pick-up trucks briefly captured overnight, taking advantage of low police presence during the Eid holidays, police said.

A third policeman was injured when the remote-controlled bomb exploded and struck a patrol vehicle in the western province of Herat early Monday, a district governor said on Monday.

"It was a Taliban attack," said Mohammad Naim Karimi, governor of Shindand district where the attack occurred.

A Taliban spokesman, Yousuf Ahmadi, said rebels with the movement were behind the blast, which was similar to hundreds carried out by the Al-Qaeda-linked militants in an insurgency that was its bloodiest last year.

Ahmadi also said Taliban were holding a district police chief and three other men whom they captured after raiding a district in the neighbouring province of Farah late Sunday.

Dozens of Taliban attacked the centre of Khaki Safed district and took control for nearly an hour, provincial police chief Sayed Agha Sabet said.

They looted and torched buildings and kidnapped the district police chief and a bodyguard, he said, adding the men had taken advantage of the low police presence over the three-day Eid holidays to strike.

The attackers were repelled when reinforcements arrived. Ahmadi claimed the fighters had held the district for several hours.

Rebels fighting to reinstall the Taliban government toppled in late 2001 briefly captured various underpoliced and remote districts last year but officials dismissed this as an insignificant show of force.

The governor of the eastern province of Nangahar had meanwhile appointed a team to investigate the shooting dead of two men in a raid by foreign forces on a home in the area.

More than 200 people travelled in convoy to Nangarhar capital Sunday with the bodies of the men killed hours earlier to demand authorities confront the forces involved, provincial governor Gul Agha Sherzai said.

Afghan interior ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said foreign special force troops had raided a house in Chaparhar district on a tip-off that it may have been a hideout for "bad elements" -- a reference to Taliban or other rebels.

A confrontation erupted, resulting in the shootout, Bashary said. Sherzai said the troops had been shot at and returned fire.

The US-led coalition and separate NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said they were not involved; Bashary said there was "no doubt" the soldiers were foreign.

The activities of special forces in Afghanistan are secret. The troops took two other people with them for questioning, Bashary said.

Civilians are regularly caught up in violence linked to an insurgency by the hardline Taliban and its Islamist allies, and the efforts of thousands of foreign and Afghan troops to put down the rebellion.

About 1,000 were killed last year, many of them in more than 110 suicide bombings carried out by the Taliban or in anti-rebel air strikes by foreign forces.

Some Afghans allege foreign forces are sometimes fed misinformation, including by people wanting to settle personal scores.

Security still trumps reconstruction for Afghan elders

by Sardar Ahmad Sun Dec 31 - TIRIN KOT, Afghanistan (AFP) - Tribal chief Naqibullah tells the visiting officials his village needs a road; chief Ghulam Jilani wants a school for his; and local legislator Hamdullah asks for a hospital.

But everyone at the meeting between tribal elders, and government and Western military representatives in the southern city of Tirin Kot is united on the top priority.

"We want security," the local elders tell the official delegation dispatched from the capital Kabul to assess the reconstruction priorities of four Taliban-dominated provinces in southern Afghanistan.

"We want reconstruction but ahead of that, security is vital," stresses Hamdullah in Tirin Kot, capital of Uruzgan province and one of several towns the delegation visited last week.

The visitors agree, adding reconstruction is an important part of ending the unrest that this year shot to its highest level since the hardline Taliban were toppled from government in 2001, later launching an insurgency.

Out here in the provinces, the difficulties facing ordinary people range from A to Z.

From the chopper that brought the visitors to Tirin Kot -- a shabby town made up of little more than a line of shops and a conglomeration of mudbrick buildings -- small, snowbound villages could be seen cut off from the outside world because they had no proper roads.

In some areas, fields and homes appear to have been abandoned after the drought which ravaged the area during last year's harsh summer.

Much of the infrastructure destroyed by nearly three decades of war has yet to be rebuilt, and new facilities are lacking.

"Unless there is a massive reconstruction in this region, we won't have security," says Asif Rahimi, the deputy rural development minister who headed the delegation to the Taliban-troubled south.

"Once the roads are rebuilt, once they get their towns rebuilt, their schools reconstructed and hospitals reopened, people will think ... 'Look, we got a government which works for us,'" he says.

"Then they'll support their government," he adds. "This is what we're doing."

The spike in Taliban violence in 2006 -- with about 4,000 people killed, most of them rebels -- has lead to some soul-searching and a new focus on development.

There is an acknowledgement the massive campaign that has put nearly 40,000 troops and sophisticated military hardware from 37 nations alongside Afghan forces is not enough to defeat the Taliban.

Ordinary villagers must be brought on the government's side and persuaded to reject the militants, officials say.

"Only fighting the Taliban by picking up arms and attacking them is not enough," says Dutch Lieutenant Colonel Gerard Koot, commander of a civilian and military reconstruction team in Tirin Kot.

"Reconstruction is the future," he told AFP. "Security is not only provided by attacking Taliban ... if the (people) are convinced the government is really working, they'll choose the side of the government."

But this is still going to take "much time," he warns, adding that support for the extremist militia is strongest in areas where there is little government influence.

"They are supporting the Taliban not only because they're forced to, but also people are supporting the Taliban because they believe in Taliban," Koot says at his base overlooking the poverty-stricken town.

In neighbouring Zabul province, the situation is similar. The poverty is striking, there is little evidence of reconstruction and the area is another Taliban stronghold.

"The people are so tired," says provincial governor Delbar Jan Arman. "They don't have roads, they don't have clinics, schools, and we don't even have buildings for our institutions."

"How can one expect the people to support us while we don't deliver services to them?" he asks AFP in his mud-brick office in Qalat town, the dusty provincial capital that comes under Taliban attack from time to time.

The latest strike on Qalat was a suicide bombing that killed four people and injured 29 others on December 14.

A high-ranking police official says on condition of anonymity that his men are sometimes unable to respond to Taliban attacks because of a lack of decent roads to troubled areas.

In Kandahar, the main city in the province of the same name and where the Taliban first made their mark in the early 1990s, plans for massive reconstruction are being drawn up to tackle these problems, according to officials.

A focus is the Panjwayi area about 35 kilometres (19 miles) west of the city.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) believed in September it had routed Taliban it said wanted to use the area as a launchpad to capture Kandahar city. But months later it is still battling reinfiltration.

Reconstruction projects will nonetheless be pushed ahead over winter as the Taliban are forced out or withdraw for the cold months, according to an ISAF official.

"I'm sure they will come back next spring," the high-ranking official tells AFP on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to media.

But "next spring, when they come back, they'll find it totally different," he said, referring to "serious reconstruction." Not everyone is sure about such plans.

"There have been promises that never were fulfilled," says Hamdullah, the legislator in Uruzgan who like many Afghans uses only one name. "We want action this time, not just another promise."

Afghanistan unable to melt down tons of old tanks, planes

Mon Jan 1, 2:30 AM ET

KABUL (AFP) - Afghanistan has two million tons of old army tanks, buses, planes and other machinery stacked up after its years of war but no way to melt the scrap down, a report has said.

Officials are concerned the metal is losing its worth, depriving the destitute country of its use, the Pajhwok news agency reported.

The scrap could amount to about two million tons of iron, it cited mines ministry spokesman Khogman Uloomi as saying. However there are no factories capable of melting down the metal, he said.

Abandoned tanks are a common sight in Afghanistan, many of them dating from the 10-year Soviet occupation that was fiercely resisted by Afghan fighters.

The occupiers were forced out in 1989 but conflict continued to engulf the country for years, with a bitter civil war only ending with the extremist Taliban movement's takeover of government in 1996.

Most of a fleet of about 1,600 passenger buses that had been on the roads about 20 years ago were ruined during the fighting, Pajhwok quoted an official from the bus corporation saying.

Skeletons of dozens of the buses can be seen stacked several deep in the war-scarred capital.

Casualty of war - Afghans would suffer most if Canadian mission ended early

By DOUG BEAZLEY, EDMONTON SUN December 31, 2006

We were sitting in a restaurant in Kabul, Fauzia Assifi and I, drinking coffee. In the street outside, concrete barriers marked the spot where a bomber blew himself to paradise two months previous, along with 10 Afghan bystanders.

Assifi's a product of the great Afghan diaspora of the early 1980s - in her '50s, educated, opinionated, devout enough to cover her hair in public but brave enough to call President Hamid Karzai a weak-kneed kleptocrat in public. She works with Afghan orphans, who number somewhere over a million - children of a war that never seems to end.

She loathes her government, distrusts the Americans and fears whatever plans Iran and Pakistan have for her country if its current government collapses. But Canadians? What would happen, I asked her, if the Canadians left Afghanistan tomorrow?

"Devastation," she said, setting down her cup and looking me straight in the eyes. "Complete and total. Like nothing you can imagine. "Things are bad now. They can still get worse."

Coming home from a place like Afghanistan can be something of a shock. What surprised me most when I got reacquainted with the political media back home - all the stuff we'd missed while away - was how little we'd actually missed.

There was Stephane Dion, the new Liberal leader, talking about the need to withdraw from Afghanistan before 2009 "with honour" - whatever that means - a complete 180 from the position he staked out months previous. He's straddling a fence, and it looks painful.

There was Jack Layton and the NDP, of course, insisting on an immediate withdrawal and negotiations with the Taliban - a lunatic concept, although it might be amusing to see Jack try it out in person.

The flagging polls reflect a public confused about the mission's aim, afraid of getting sucked into another Iraq and anxious about any links between Canadian foreign policy and the feckless adventurism of the Bush school.

In other words, the debate in Canada was going on as if no one in the country knew, or cared, what had actually happened to Afghanistan in the years since 2001. Things did not get worse. They got better.

Since the Taliban were driven from power, 4.8 million children - a third of them girls - have gone back to school. Twelve thousand villages now have clean drinking water, and 3.7 million refugees have returned home.

In the streets of Kabul it was plain to see - a city plagued by war, poverty and decay, carefully coming back to life. The street bazaars are doing a roaring trade. The movie theatres are open again, showing colourful Bollywood musicals once banned under the Taliban.

Everywhere you can hear music, sacred and secular, drifting from the minarets or grinding out of cheap Chinese beat boxes. Kabul's a happening place.

But there are problems, and the problems were predictable in 2001. Everywhere in Kabul there are half-finished construction projects covered in five-year-old scaffolding, sidetracked by the Afghan bureaucracy's appetite for graft.

The orphans are everywhere - they're poorer than poor, illiterate and completely ignored by the government. In Afghanistan, such children usually end up carrying a gun.

And there are wider problems to do with the mission itself. Everyone knows how much of Europe abandoned the Afghan mission almost as soon as it started - pulling troops, placing them under caveats that basically barred them from shooting at anyone in anything but self-defence.

After 2001, public opinion in Europe shifted sharply... partly due to the Americans' cockup in Iraq, and partly due to a 21st-century reluctance on the part of many western nations to get involved in mutual self-defence.

The day after 9-11, NATO invoked for the first time in its history Article 5 of its charter - the part that says that an attack on one NATO nation is an attack on all. More than five years later, it's clear that a lot of NATO partners don't really believe in the alliance anymore.

And so the Canadians, the Dutch and the Americans were left with the dirty, dangerous work in Kandahar. They're fighting an enemy funded and equipped out of Pakistan, whose president presents himself as an ally of the West.

The Americans, meanwhile, have been single-handedly pursuing their daft program of opium eradication, alienating vast numbers of ordinary Afghans who can't feed their families without growing poppies.

Instead of buying up Afghanistan's poppy crop for legitimate drug markets (an option which might be cheaper in the long run than burning them), the U.S. opium-eradication plan makes it harder for every NATO soldier to present himself to Afghans as a force for peace and reconstruction.

"There's no consistency in NATO policy in Afghanistan, no common voice," said Lasha Tchantouridze, an Afghanistan expert at the University of Manitoba's Centre for Defence and Security Studies. "Opium eradication is simply not practical. The attempt is making the situation worse."

A failure for NATO in Afghanistan could rip the alliance apart completely, robbing us of another one of those "multilateral" bodies which are supposed to keep the planet's last superpower in check. But that's all big-picture stuff - out of our hands, mostly.

In the small picture we have Canada, a country which just isn't used to war anymore, whose politicians haven't grasped the language needed to talk about it.

Many Liberals and New Democrats talk about Canada sacrificing its "tradition" of peacekeeping in Afghanistan - as if peacekeeping could still work in a world without two superpowers to guarantee the outcome.

I have no idea whether Canada will stick it out in Afghanistan. I know we have some of the smartest, bravest, most resourceful Canadians alive serving in central Asia right now. They have the respect of their fellow coalition soldiers. More importantly, they have the respect of Afghans - notoriously hard people to impress.

"No one wants Afghanistan to live in peace," said Marjdin, an unemployed Afghan living with his five small children in a roofless hut outside Kabul.

"The Muslim nations, they did nothing for us. But Canada came to help us. Canada is a friend."

We've made a lot of friends in Afghanistan - labourers, farmers who've used the bubble of security created by Canadian forward bases to rebuild their lives. If we leave them now, we abandon them first to the murderous revenge of the Taliban ... and then to an almost guaranteed civil war.

So let's not fool ourselves. This mission will either last another 10 years, or it will end tomorrow. If we leave Afghanistan early, it won't be because our mission has "failed," or because we feel we'd be better off delivering aid. That will just be the cover story.

If we leave, it will be due to our impatience, our inner divisions, a loss of faith in NATO, in multilateralism, in ourselves. We'll be retreating from our status as a global power, back into our "little Canada" cocoon. And we'll be abandoning people who had every right to expect better of us.

Afghan trade team to import Pak made diesel engine

Associated Press of Pakistan - LAHORE, Dec 31 (APP): Another high level private sector trade delegation from Afghanistan will visit Lahore after Eidul Azha to import Pak made diesel engines for agricultural purpose.

Chief executive officer KAM Engineering, Khalid Saeed told APP here Sunday that the Pak made KAM diesel engines have become very popular in Afghanistan, compared to all brands of those made in India, and are being successfully used for agricultural purposes.

He said the Afghan team will visit the state of the art plant and see the engine assembly process, using indigenous technical know how and expertise, which has helped to control the price of the product with minimum overhead expenses.

In their war torn country, the Afghanis are now inclined to bring maximum area under cultivation to meet the ever increasing need for food grains. For this purpose, they need quality agri inputs and implements, and Pakistan made products offer the guarantee to compete in terms of quality and price, said the firm’s director marketing, Sh Amin Akhtar.

Khalid Saeed said we have already sold thousands of engines of different capacity to Afghan brothers on cash payment. He said we are also providing after sale service facility even in Afghanistan.

He said we have also successfully manufactured a mini truck for agriculture purpose which he added will be much cheaper than all others in open market. He said this truck has been under trial for the last couple of year. He said that although we have given successful demonstration to Minister of State for Agriculture during his visit to plant.

It will be marketed soon after its final clearance by our high level team of technical experts and permission from government.

1,373 miles into the heart of Afghanistan

The Los Angeles Times 12/31/2006 By Paul Watson

The Ring Road is meant to link the nation and connect its major cities. But traveling the route is no Sunday drive

Shahr-i-Safa — AS a hair-thin line on a map, Afghanistan's national Ring Road looks easy enough to conquer. But tell war-hardened Afghans that you're going to travel its entire 1,373-mile length unarmed, facing winter and a raging insurgency, and they look at you like you're completely mad.

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, it shouldn't be such a challenge. Rebuilding the two-lane highway that connects Afghanistan's major cities has been a centerpiece of the U.S.-led effort to transform the nation. It is so important that Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, said that President Bush once demanded daily updates on the roadwork from Kabul south to Kandahar, the seat of power under Taliban rule.

U.S. grants have paid for rebuilding a third of the road, according to Afghan government figures. Japan, Saudi Arabia and Iran are responsible for repairing other sections, a rare case in which Washington and Tehran are working toward the same goal. Officially, the $1.05-billion project is almost finished.

But as with many things in Afghanistan, there is a chasm between the rhetoric and reality.

Some of the best stretches of the road are among the Taliban's favorite killing grounds. This fall, Canadian troops led the biggest ground battle in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 57-year history, in part to regain control of a stretch of highway west of Kandahar. The NATO offensive cleared the insurgents, but guerrillas and highway robbers still prey on travelers in many other places.

About 40% of the road isn't finished. Some sections are nothing more than muddy tracks through the country's lawless Wild West, where you can drive for hours without seeing another vehicle fishtailing and backsliding through the muck along with you.

The only way to understand the condition of the road and grasp what it says about Afghanistan is to drive it.

The trip took my interpreter, driver and me seven days, inching along slippery edges of steep cliffs, wandering in the wilderness without road signs, suffering two flat tires, a ruptured radiator and a spinout on mountain ice.

On the way, we managed to avoid a Taliban ambush, a potential kidnapper or highway robber, a suicide bomber and a gunman who fired close enough to take off one of our heads.

I KNEW some of the Ring Road all too well. I traveled it for weeks in the early Taliban era a decade ago, when years of war and neglect already had reduced the highway to patches of broken asphalt connected by dirt, rocks and ruts. A trip that would take a few hours on a proper road was days of torture, the speedometer straining to break 10 mph as the vehicle crawled over shell craters and pond-sized potholes.

This time, I would be leaving from Kabul with interpreter Wesal Zaman and driver Zyarat Gul. A quiet and calm man, Gul had gotten us home safely from other terrible places.

Before starting out, we visited three experts at the Economics Ministry to find out what we were in for.

Sayed Arif Nazif, the ministry's director of design, told us that the building of the road began in the mid-1970s. The United States helped, but most of the money came from the Soviet Union and Arab countries.

Farmers used the road to get their produce to market. Afghanistan became the world's largest exporter of dried grapes, apples and other fruit. It also sent an assortment of nuts.

"In those days, in terms of our roads, we were much more advanced than neighboring countries," Nazif said. "But because of the wars and other problems, all our roads were destroyed."

Soviet troops and tanks poured down the Ring Road to invade Afghanistan in the dead of night on Dec. 25, 1979, setting off a decades-long tailspin from which Afghans are still trying to recover.

The rebuilding of the road is supposed to help revive the economy and break down ethnic differences by allowing Afghans to travel more freely. Although dried fruit exports are 20% of what they were before the wars, reconstruction is showing benefits, Nazif said. This year, the repaved road allowed farmers to get fresh pomegranates, grapes and apples to Kabul's airport, and the first few flights delivered the produce to wealthy Persian Gulf states.

I had a more pressing question: "How long do you think it would take to drive the whole Ring Road?"

Nazif shifted in his seat. "Take the length of 1,373 miles, and divide by an average speed of 50 miles an hour," he said.

"That sounds like we could do it in maybe four days," I replied, trying to do some quick mental math. Nazif smiled and nodded, but we both knew Afghanistan was a lot more complicated than that.

Before we started, we took some precautions that are prudent for any trip into the countryside: We loaded the car with two spare tires, a shovel, bottled water and snacks. And we made one rule: If Gul, an ethnic Pashtun like most of the Taliban, saw anything on the horizon or felt anything he didn't like, he should turn around without pausing to ask us.

AS the Ring Road begins a steady climb out of Kabul on a 27-mile section rebuilt by the Taliban, the horizon is bright white with towering snow-covered mountains. The road is as smooth as any in the United States. But the government can't afford to keep it plowed, so it was covered with packed snow and ice that brought long lines of heavy transports to a halt on the highlands near Ghazni.

We were less than six hours into the journey near Shahr-i-Safa when we saw the first signs of Taliban activity.

Four insurgents armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades had ridden two motorcycles to a hill overlooking a stretch of the highway near Qalat. About 3 p.m., they opened fire on a civilian truck taking supplies to an Afghan military base, a common guerrilla tactic.

Normally, insurgents carry out swift attacks and make a getaway into the desert. But this time a pickup carrying half a dozen Afghan national army troops happened by. They pinned the guerrillas down from behind and called in a second unit to attack from the front.

We reached the scene about half an hour after the battle ended. Jubilant Afghan troops were smiling and joking next to three Taliban corpses, like scavengers enjoying quality roadkill. One of the dead men lay on his back with his knees bent, as if he might jump up at any moment. But the bullet hole in his neck left no doubt his war was over.

The fourth fighter escaped, so the victory wasn't complete, said Afghan army Maj. Atullah Maiwandwal.

It was a battle too small to make the news, let alone change the course of a war. But the major and his men had achieved something significant: Without U.S. military advisors or foreign backup, they defended a piece of highway rebuilt with a $237-million U.S. grant, the sort of gradual progress that often gets lost amid the noise of suicide bombings and other insurgent attacks.

"Where are your bodyguards?" one soldier asked, stunned that we were traveling the highway without weapons.

We explained that we preferred to travel unencumbered by armed escorts. So as night fell, we rushed off to Kandahar, which has been staggering under a wave of suicide bombings. The governor gave us beds in his guest house.

Early the next morning, we headed west into Helmand province, the scene of fierce fighting this year between NATO forces and the Taliban.

A large billboard on the edge of Kandahar declared that the highway was being rebuilt as a gift of the Japanese people.

Actually, the 70 miles of road that Japan pledged $76 million to fix is the same bumpy, cracked surface that it has been for years. The area is too dangerous for road crews.

It is the hashish harvest season, and marijuana plants as big as Christmas trees are stacked by the thousands against mud-brick homes, curing in the sun. Villagers scrape the gooey resin, which is pressed into blocks and exported along the same routes that move the opium used to produce heroin, a big source of the insurgents' income.

Hundreds of gunmen prowl the Ring Road in Helmand. They are members of private militias who take orders from local warlords and drug barons and operate illegal checkpoints, mostly to squeeze money from truck drivers.

As one longtime resident of Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, told us, "They are loyal to the government until 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and then until the next morning they're enemies."

As we neared the Lashkar Gah turnoff, in an area where we were told that kidnappers had abducted two German journalists, our driver broke our one rule.

GUL slowed for a speed bump, and instead of accelerating when a militiaman jumped up with an AK-47, he stopped. Gul opened the driver's window, apparently weighing the comparative risks of getting shot and getting kidnapped. The gunman stuck his head in, saw me in the back seat and smiled like a dog sniffing fresh meat.

"Get us out of here!" I shouted at Gul, and he hesitated. "Get moving!" Gul hit the gas. The barrel of the gunman's rifle clunked off the rear side of the car. Not daring to look back, I tensed for the shot that didn't come.

In Lashkar Gah, we stopped at a construction agency funded by the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, where we previously had met cook Khudai Nazar. At 64, he is old enough to remember what is possible with peace, and young enough to believe he might live to see it again.

We asked what he remembered of the Ring Road of his childhood. He sent his son for an opaque plastic sandwich bag stuffed with browning reference letters and old photographs.

They tell of a more innocent age, from the late 1940s to the 1970s, when American workers and their families lived in Helmand. They were building a dam, a power plant, irrigation canals and other development projects in the Afghan desert.

In one black-and-white photograph, Nazar is 12 years old and standing on a lush lawn surrounded by a white picket fence with his new bicycle, a gift from Rose and Don Wonderly of Portland, Ore.

"The first time I met with her, I didn't understand English," recalled Nazar, who speaks with an American accent. "American people always like children, and they didn't have any. She said come every day to my house and I'm gonna teach you English."

Within a few days, Rose was giving the boy new clothes and encouraging other American families to leave him some of their hand-me-downs. The Wonderlys left in 1960.

By the time the Soviets invaded in 1979, Nazar had worked for a string of other Americans: George Belissary promoted the servant to a warehouse job; JoAnn and Ronald Thompson of Sacramento praised his bread-baking skills; Jack and Maxine Smith wrote of their fondness for his pastries and good humor.

The Smiths had to flee the Soviet occupation after 17 months in Afghanistan, and in her last words to him, Nazar said, Maxine urged him to take his wife and their 10 children to Pakistan.

"She said, 'Just send me a message and I'll have a house waiting for you — everything,' " Nazar said wistfully. It was clear in his breaking voice that he wished he could have left. But he never found enough money, or will, to turn his back on the land of his birth.

Nazar bid us farewell with the hope that some of his long-lost American friends might try to reach him, maybe even risk a visit.

Three hours after we left Lashkar Gah, a suicide bomber walked into the well-guarded compound of the provincial governor, a few blocks from where we'd visited Nazar, and blew himself up in the parking lot, killing eight people.

HEADING north toward Herat, we drove for several hours past mountains weathered so smooth they seemed molded from clay. We reached Herat that night, putting us more than halfway along the Ring Road at the end of our second day.

Swift progress made us overconfident. We talked about being back in Kabul in a day or so. We marveled at the traffic lights operating at all the main intersections in Herat, the only major city to escape the destruction of Afghanistan's wars.

The pleasure was short-lived. The next morning, 35 miles northeast of Herat, the highway abruptly ended. We didn't see asphalt again for three days.

Iran was supposed to complete 70 miles of paved road from Herat into Badghis province, but its contractors suddenly stopped work, said Gov. Mohammed Naseem Tokhi. Some say the money ran out; others cite unspecified problems between Iran and the rest of the international community, Tokhi said. He has received no official explanation.

The Afghan national government hasn't even been able to find a country willing to fund construction of the road through the rest of the province.

Entering Badghis was like driving back into biblical times. Ours was the only internal-combustion engine running for miles. Most people were walking or riding donkeys. The gray smoke of cooking fires seeped through the black fabric of nomads' low-slung tents.

The province's people, many of whom are Pashtuns, have long felt cut off from the rest of the country. Now they are largely missing out on billions of dollars in international aid, and that makes Badghis an ideal recruiting ground for insurgents. Grinding poverty and poor health have left even moderates angry with Karzai's government and its foreign backers.

Prolonged drought followed by devastating floods last month left three-quarters of the province's people without enough food, Tokhi said. The only roads into the province are so bad that relief agencies are having a tough time reaching people. Many could die during the winter, he said.

In the frontier town of Bala Murghab, a Ring Road bridge is a dangerously unstable span covered with metal sheets laid by people who salvaged them from a derelict factory. The 200,000 residents of the surrounding area have no electricity, and their water is so bad that diarrhea is a main killer.

Smoldering rage exploded this fall when gunmen stormed the district commissioner's new headquarters, a three-story yellow brick building built by USAID. They blasted a rocket-propelled grenade through the guardhouse and fired assault rifles at offices and police cars, shattering most of the main building's windows. The district commissioner fled for his life. Three foreign workers at a U.S.-based agency's compound escaped by hiding in their garden as rampaging mobs looted the buildings.

When the aid agency shut its office, townspeople persuaded its Afghan supervisor, Ghalam Seddiq, to become mayor. Slipping another prayer bead along a string as he talked to us, Seddiq said the attackers wanted to stop the aid agency's education programs and prevent children from learning, a Taliban priority.

The center of town is a ramshackle bazaar, where merchants glared as we drove along muddy streets. A large padlock sealed the front doors of the only hotel. The elderly caretaker said it was too dangerous to stay there, but the new district commissioner ordered the hotel to open for us.

In this Afghan version of a Wild West town, Abdul Jalil Sekandari is the deputy sheriff.

Guarded by a young man with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder, Sekandari dropped by our hotel room that night. By the glow of an oil lamp, he griped about the government and foreign aid, personally guaranteed our safety and invited us to spend the night with him in the police station. We thought our odds were better in the hotel.

WE rode out of town at first light. We weren't far into the countryside when a man in a Taliban-style black turban lurking near a disabled Soviet tank leveled his Kalashnikov rifle and took a potshot at us. We heard the loud hiss-snap of a bullet passing close by, but he didn't fire again. It must have been a good-riddance round.

Soon even the dirt road disappeared into a labyrinth of mud tracks that crisscrossed broad valleys. We fishtailed and churned our way through dense fog, along tire ruts at least 2 feet deep. The four-wheel-drive car jerked and bucked like a rodeo bull.

There were no road signs, and no other vehicles. So the only thing to do was ask directions from a shepherd or a farmer working the sodden earth with a wooden plow pulled by his donkey.

"Does this road go to Maimana?" we asked an old man at one crossroads.

"Yes. But others prefer that way," he replied, nodding toward a dirt road heading in the opposite direction.

When we pulled in for a rest in Maimana, a pool of green fluid spilled out of a hole in the radiator, which a mechanic pounded shut the next morning.

We finally returned to paved highway at Andkhoi, a dust-blown place near the border with Turkmenistan, where for centuries tribal weavers have produced some of Afghanistan's best carpets.

Mohammed Ikram, a dealer representing more than 400 female weavers, was at the roadside, squatting in the dirt to measure a carpet in a floral design of red, blue and yellow. It would go to Pakistan, where a trader would pay about $210 a yard, attach a "Made in Pakistan" label and export it to the United States or Europe for hundreds of dollars in profit, Ikram said.

If Afghanistan could have peace and security, traders would follow the Ring Road straight to Andkhoi, he imagined. "And if tourists come here, then we will all be rich," Ikram said, smiling.

Paved highway awaited us on the other side of town, so we pressed on south to Mazar-i-Sharif, chattering about how good it would feel to have hot water and lights.

Come back later

MAZAR-I-SHARIF means Tomb of the Exalted. It is home to one of the holiest sites in Islam. Some Shiites believe it is the final burial place of Hazrat Ali, the prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, who was assassinated and first buried near Baghdad in the 7th century. Blood is still being spilled over the schism that followed, but not in Afghanistan.

Robbers are the biggest threat on the roads around Mazar. Andkhoi's carpet traders say they are regularly fleeced by gunmen demanding illegal road taxes.

After a night of comfort in Mazar, it was an easy drive to the Salang Tunnel, a 1.7-mile passage at 11,034 feet built by the Soviets through the Hindu Kush mountains on the route south to Kabul.

In winter, howling blizzards pummel the Salang's peaks. Avalanches, asphyxiation and plunges off cliffs have killed dozens of travelers.

As we headed up the pass, we recalled another trip a few weeks earlier when Gul skidded on black ice in the tunnel. The wheels hit the edge of a concrete walkway so hard that the front axle broke. He was elected to walk through a blizzard to a public works outpost a mile down the mountain. It was the middle of the night and deathly cold. A few workers huddled around a small wood stove.

"Is anyone hurt?" one asked when Gul asked for help. "No." "Are there any women?" "No." "Are you stuck in the middle of the road?" “No." "Then go back to your car and come back in the morning."

This time, we made it through the tunnel and most of the Salang Pass without problems. The sky was ice blue, the road mostly clear. It seemed too easy for the end to such a hard journey. Just then, Gul put the car into a 360-degree spin. A snow bank kept us from going over the edge.

We sat silently for a few seconds, staring up at the meandering Ring Road to see whether that was the worst that would happen — or whether fate was about to catch up with us in the form of a sliding truck.

Our luck held. There wasn't anyone close enough to harm us. The car, with every bolt, spring and cable caked in mud, creaked and shimmied its way down the Shomali plains, and in a few hours we were overlooking Kabul, sprawled out across a plateau and shrouded in brown smog. The capital hadn't had a suicide bombing for days. The only thing left to worry about was traffic.

[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.]