Afghanistan's faltering rebirth may be lesson for Iraq

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Police officer Saifullah says he hasn't seen a salary in months. His police station has just one car and two radios, shared among 115 officers. If he runs into trouble while on foot patrol, he has to race back to the station to summon help.

It has been 18 months since U.S.-led forces swept the Taliban religious regime from power, and at a time when the Bush administration is declaring major combat operations to be over in their country, people like Saifullah are disillusioned and worry the chance to create a new Afghanistan is slipping away.

Attempts to assemble a national army and police force are floundering, regional warlords are increasingly powerful, and the Taliban itself shows signs of making a comeback. The government's writ does not run far beyond Kabul, the capital, and even here, protection is guaranteed not so much by Afghan cops as by nearly 5,000 international peacekeepers.

If the pace of reconstruction in Afghanistan is anything to go by, the challenge posed in Iraq seems even more daunting. It's not too late to turn things around, says Afghanistan's interim president, Hamid Karzai, but "we are really at the eleventh hour."

Elections planned

Billions in international aid was promised for Afghanistan, but the $1.8 billion that has flowed in has gone mostly to emergency aid for refugees and war victims -- help that's badly needed, but not the sort that generates jobs and improves living standards.

The big test begins now. In March, at a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, the international community promised $2 billion for the 2003-04 fiscal year, with the biggest chunk, $820 million, coming from the United States.

Meanwhile, a constitution is being drafted and elections are planned for June next year. A successful outcome depends heavily on whether the aid is spent rebuilding dams, roads and cities, and giving Afghans a sense of the security they haven't known for nearly a quarter-century.

Afghanistan and Iraq have much in common. Both have suffered through years of conflict and are divided by centuries-old ethnic rivalries. They are roughly similar in size and population, both are overwhelmingly Muslim and both are strategically positioned -- each bordered by a half-dozen countries of various degrees of friendliness.

There are also immense differences. Afghanistan has scant natural resources. Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves, and its populace is much better educated, its infrastructure more advanced.

Both pose a similar challenge of the West's ability to plant democracy and roll back the forces of Islamic extremism.

Slow improvements

Apart from improving lives, Afghan reconstruction means pacifying a lawless land ruled by warlords, and the picture is not encouraging.

"People of Afghanistan want a strong central government and the longer this takes, the more disillusioned they become, and ... the more it opens the door for those who want to create mischief," Vice President Amin Arsala said.

Karzai told AP that with hindsight, he wishes more of the initial aid had gone for rebuilding the roads that link the cities, repairing some of the 30 dams that provide electricity and irrigation, and installing a phone system for a nation that now depends on a cellular network affordable to only by the wealthy.

"It is not true that nothing has happened," Karzai said. "But the things that people want most, like reconstruction of highways, reconstruction of electricity, reconstruction of dams -- those major big projects that they wanted to see visible for all the nation -- that has been very, very slow."

------

EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press reporters Jim Heintz in Doha, Qatar, and D'Arcy Doran in Bagram, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.