Afghans lack rebuilding plan

By Charles J. Hanley

Associated Press

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Neighbor is begging for protection from neighbor. Hundreds of thousands of uprooted people live meal to meal. The makeshift new Afghan army draws its pay in plates of potatoes and onions. The world’s aid agencies, in a land with almost nothing, barely know where to begin.

With single-minded firepower and the world watching, the U.S. military is pressing its offensive against an al-Qaida force in a mountainous corner of Afghanistan.

In 28 other provinces, however, other stories are unfolding away from the headlines. Some are critical to Afghanistan’s future, determining whether it develops into a stable, peaceful nation, or collapses again into a failed state, a vacuum inviting new explosions.

American forces have moved swiftly and overwhelmingly in their 5-month-old Afghan war on terror, a campaign that has cost an estimated $6.4 billion thus far, including the replacement cost for 18,000 missiles and bombs dropped across this land.

But the campaign to rebuild Afghanistan, after 23 years of war, has not moved ahead with military efficiency. Only recently did the United Nations issue an appeal for $1.18 billion in humanitarian and development aid from donor governments to fulfill pledges made for this year at a Tokyo conference in January.

Here in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, a jostling, fume-choked place of several hundred thousand people, few signs can be found of aid at work, beyond the polio vaccine and UNICEF school kits distributed to children last week. No rebuilding project stands as a symbol of international help. Few jobs have been created since the Taliban regime fell in December.

Aid flights, when not pre-empted by military aircraft, have been landing in this southern city with emergency relief supplies for a huge population of displaced Afghans. Refugees from war, some of whom left long ago, have begun returning from Pakistan.

At the same time, new refugees are streaming in from Afghanistan’s north, in another portent of a troubled future in this multiethnic land.

Pashtuns from the north, where they are a minority, are fleeing to the Pashtun heartland of the south with tales of pillaging and violence at the hands of Gen. Rashid Dostum’s Uzbek militia, which also has skirmished with a Tajik group. Similar stories of anti-Pashtun harassment and killings come from the western province of Herat, ruled by yet another warlord, Ismail Khan.

Uzbeks, Tajiks and Pashtuns, long hostile to each other, joined in the war against the Taliban. But unity vanished with December’s victory, and they’re still in disarray in March. In the months to come, the centrifugal forces of ethnic Afghanistan may test Hamid Karzai’s interim central government.

Karzai’s weak regime has not even challenged Afghanistan’s opium farmers, now cultivating their poppy fields in defiance of a Karzai ban. Few expect it to try to face down the armies of warlords bent on holding onto regional autonomy.

The new Afghan army won’t help. A paper force drawn from tribal militias and cooperative warlords, most of its men are sitting at home in the villages waiting for a call. Those on active duty are often drilling without uniforms, living in makeshift tent camps, and waiting, after two months or more, for their first pay. At the Kandahar garrison, meals of potatoes and onions are the only reward for a day of soldiering.

That’s why Afghans from Karzai down to junior army officers want the United Nations to double or quadruple its 4,500-soldier peacekeeping force, and extend its scope beyond Kabul.

Washington, D.C., has been slow to embrace that idea, especially if it means committing U.S. troops long-term to Afghanistan. And congressional leaders are already asking for an "exit strategy."

But as some look for the door in Afghanistan, the real story may be about to begin.