KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- The clock is ticking. In the two months since the rout of the Taliban, and despite an international agreement reached at the UN Talks in Bonn in December to form an interim government under Hamid Karzai, this nation has once again become a cluster of city-states ruled by autonomous warlords. So far, the new government has been powerless to halt the return of chaos. Karzai has five months left in his temporary term of office to either stabilize the situation or turn it around. Achieving either objective will be a political -- and possibly military -- miracle.

Some degree of political stability and governmental unity is crucial if the international-aid effort is to succeed in feeding and rebuilding this war-ravaged land, where an estimated 80 percent of the population is illiterate. But recent history doesn't bode well. Afghanistan's last attempt at coalition government, in the 1990s, fell apart when civil war erupted among rival warlords. Most of the warlords -- veterans of the CIA sponsored "holy war" of resistance against the Soviet invaders -- became so disenchanted with the anarchy that they willingly submitted to rule by the Taliban, giving little thought, it seems, to the radical Islamist sect's own totalitarian tendencies. In most quarters today, self-interest, tribal loyalty, and regional hegemony continue to trump national need. Underscoring the fragility of the situation, leaders serving in cabinet positions under the Bonn agreement at first refused to leave their scattered power bases throughout the country. And when they finally met, the overriding subject of concern was how firewood would be distributed to the new cabinet -- not an unimportant issue in a largely bombed-out nation without central heating, but certainly not one calculated to address the massive troubles faced by the entire country.

When wealthy donor nations and aid organizations gathered at the Afghanistan-reconstruction summit in Tokyo two weeks ago, two questions were paramount in the minds of bureaucrats and government officials: "Will aid money get to the right places?" and "How will a country with no infrastructure be able to spend it?" These questions are fair enough, but they beg the larger issue: `How will the Western-coalition nations prevent diversion of aid without a substantial military peacekeeping effort?"

TRAVELING BY road is the easiest way to observe the atomization of Afghanistan. Driving down the highway, which is little more than a dirt trail strewn with rocks, from the Pakistan border to Kabul is like running the gauntlet. Barreling down the uneven track, cars race at high speed without stopping; checkpoints are never good news. The bone-jarring trip could be pleasant if circumstances were different. Afghanistan's blue skies and stark landscape look remarkably like Southern California on a sunny day -- only it's colder.

The natural beauty, however, masks the dread any trip like this evokes. It's been well reported how four journalists were dragged out of their convoy and beaten to death between Jalalabad and Kabul late last year. If reports are to be believed, bandits have killed as many as 20 people making the trek since then. Two days before I made my first trip, I heard that two civilians were stopped by bandits and killed. Transport between cities has become so difficult that the UN stopped grain shipments over three weeks ago and appealed for security forces to protect the roads. Villagers just a few miles outside Jalalabad in the east and Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, with no other food, were forced to eat grass in the hills.

Because Afghanistan is fragmented into what are, in effect, feudal holdings, every region in Afghanistan lives by a different set of rules. Since local militias depend upon regional warlords for food and money, there is little incentive to change a system that has kept them alive for more than 20 years. According to Jabbar Nassery, a jovial Afghan moneychanger in Peshawar who speaks fondly of the order introduced by the Taliban even though his father worked for ex-president Mohammed Rabbani, "The situation has reverted to as it was before the Taliban. The leaders have changed sides, where once they wore lunghi [the traditional Taliban headdress], now they wear pachula [the headdress favored by the Northern Alliance]." Nassery is not alone. Dozens of Afghans interviewed feel the only thing keeping Afghanistan from dissolving into overt civil war is the threat of American bombing.

Aside from Kabul, where fewer than 500 peacekeepers struggle to maintain order, each of the five major cities in Afghanistan has reverted to the pre-Taliban control of warlords. With the exception of Kandahar, no city even pretends to support Hamid Karzai's new government in Kabul. And even in Kandahar, as prominent a figure as General Gul Agha Shirzai ignored Kabul's request to turn over seven high-ranking ministers in the Taliban government to American authorities.

Who are these men? Mohammed Rabbani, based in the north near Mazar-e-Sharif, was the president of the Northern Alliance for most of the last decade. Rabbani led a government so corrupt it was overthrown by the Taliban with vast popular support. Unsurprisingly, he was passed over to head the provisional Afghan government and left without a brief when the UN Talks in Bonn established the new regime. However, Rabbani still has plenty supporters. He has every interest in seeing Karzai fail. Insiders whisper he is behind the escalation of rivalries between Tajiks and Uzbeks in northern parts of Afghanistan.

Perhaps the most colorful of the warlords who fought in the Great Jihad, General Abdurrashid Dostum, is the northern Uzbek warlord who controls much of Mazar-e-Sharif, which exists under an uneasy peace with the Tajiks controlled by General Uftad Ata and the Hazaras led by General Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq. In the meantime, Dostum has begun to consolidate power in the North. Just last week, his forces claimed to have wrested control of the Qale Zaal district, 38 miles northwest of the town of Kunduz, from ethnic Tajiks loyal to Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim. He prints his own version of the local currency, the afghani, which trades at one-third to one-half the rate of genuine notes (about 10 million of which equal about $3.50 US). In a Western-style state, he would be considered a counterfeiter; here he is considered a hard-nosed political entrepreneur.

To the south and west, Herat and much of the border with Iran is governed by Ismail Khan, another throwback to Afghanistan's war with the Soviet Union. Some allege he is allowing Iranian mercenaries into the country, and there are reports of Iranian arms shipments being spread throughout the southern provinces of Herat, Helmand, Nimruz, and Farah. Reports of major arms smuggling and harassment of local Pashtuns has angered the nearby regime in Kandahar.

General Gul Agha Shirzai, the governor of Kandahar, is a Durrani Pashtun who controls Kandahar with the help of US forces. He has massed as many as 20,000 troops to attack Ismail Khan in Herat. At the moment, Shirzai has an uncertain alliance with interim leader Hamid Karzai, a fellow Pashtun and former deputy foreign minister under Rabbani's government.

Three minor warlords are scrambling for control over Eastern Afghanistan. In what is commonly called the Eastern Shura, former Northern Alliance commanders Hazrat Ali and Hagi Qadir plot against each other and Aghi Zaman, of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, for control over Jalalabad and the surrounding territories.

Jabbar's father, General Gulam Nassery, is the deputy minister of the interior in charge of peacekeeping in Kabul. After serving as the chief of police under the previous Northern Alliance government, he sees the fragility of the current government. "They will give us money, but what can we buy in Afghanistan?" he asks. "We need men here. Men to protect the roads. Men to protect the women in the streets. Men who believe in a greater Afghanistan. Ultimately, we need men who are not Afghans. We need the blue-helmets and we need tens of thousands of them." When asked if he thought Western nations would donate that many peacekeepers, General Nassery laughed.

To date, there is no reason to question his sense of humor. President Bush did take a step in the right direction by promising interim leader Karzai help in training the police and military, as well as $50 million in credit for private investments in addition to aid already promised. But it will take months if not years before the semblance of a national security force is in place, let alone local security forces. An influx of US forces would most likely anger allies such as Pakistan, but more ground troops from outside the region are needed to ensure that people get fed, and that requires keeping the pilfering of aid to a reasonable level.

ORGANIZED FOOD theft presents daunting problems for organizations attempting to distribute aid to rebuild the country. Much of the trouble stems from the subversion of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) -- which are, after all, ostensibly there to help. Some NGOs, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which began as charitable-relief organizations, date back to the first and second decades of the 20th century. A second wave of secular NGOs arose during and after the World War II to help with the rebuilding of Europe. In the '60s their focus shifted to the developing world, where they have played major roles in building civil society, often in partnership with the UN and the World Bank.

NGOs such as the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan and the Norwegian Committee for Afghanistan have been working in the region for about 20 years -- mostly running schools and clinics. When the United States pulled its aid from Afghanistan in 1994 after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, for example, the Swedish Committee took over the empty schools and clinics.

During the rule of the Taliban, these aid agencies were relatively safe from predation, but the return of the warlords has rendered established NGOs ripe sources of plunder. A new class of Afghan entrepreneurs, backed by the warlords, has also set up local NGOs as fronts for siphoning off UN aid such as grain distributed by the World Food Program. Making matters worse, local staffs of aid agencies in Afghanistan are themselves not immune to pressure exerted by the warlords. Since most international staffs of larger, foreign NGOs were evacuated for security reasons after September 11, local staffs of many otherwise reputable NGOs have gone into business for themselves -- joining with local warlords to sell what was meant to be given away.

It is often unclear whether local staffs of international groups enter into business with the warlords willingly or have succumbed to pressure. However, the fine clothes and fancy cars driven by local staff members suggest that, at the very least, they are enjoying the rewards of cooperation. One man showed up at his office with a new wide-screen television set -- an unheard of luxury in Afghanistan, where the new government uses pencils because it cannot afford ink.

Jalalabad offers a sickening illustration of just how the system of plunder works. About halfway between Kabul and Pakistan, Jalalabad's uncertain government is wracked by the struggles of three different warlords competing for power and resources. Food is one of those resources, and life is measured in it. A man can be killed for about 10 pounds of grain.

Because grain distributed by the UN's World Food Program was virtually the only import into Jalalabad, warlord-sponsored Afghan entrepreneurs formed NGOs to "distribute" the grain themselves on the black market. When these new NGOs couldn't meet their warlord's quota by tricking UN officials, they simply had the shipments hijacked. So much grain has been stolen, in fact, that markets in Jalalabad are flooded and prices have dropped by 40 percent.

Outside Mohammed Yousaf's warehouse in downtown Jalalabad, two policemen fidget with their Kalashnikov rifles. Inside, 50 barefoot laborers -- their faces slick with sweat -- unload trucks full of blue-and-white sacks of stolen UN grain at a dead run. Others slice open the bags and efficiently repackage them in plain burlap for sale in the city's bazaars.

Overseeing his operation from a drafty office on the second floor, the fat Jalalabad wheat dealer proclaims, "I can't make any money buying wheat . . . I have to pay the NGOs to get it for me." When asked which NGOs supplied him with wheat, Mr. Yousaf smiled and said, "All of them -- if we can't do business with the directors, then we talk to the drivers."

Truck drivers don't have much choice. Until now, over 50 trucks a day representing some 1750 metric tons of wheat made the three-hour drive to Jalalabad from Peshawar. Less than half arrived with more than 60 percent of their wheat, interviews with dozens of truck drivers revealed. As one driver said, "Sometimes they [the warlords] stop us outside of Jalalabad with some gunmen and an empty truck, other times I drop my wheat off in Jalalabad and see the same people take the wheat from where we unload it -- the NGOs sign for it." Other drivers report that gunmen simply commandeered their vehicles. According to Haneef Ata, an English-educated Afghan serving as deputy director of the IRC in Afghanistan, assassinations over grain and power are a daily occurrence in Jalalabad. "We just try to stay out of it and that is becoming increasingly difficult," he says. "If things don't change I can't see how we can continue."

THE CORRUPTION and co-opting of NGOs, the hijacking of grain shipments, and the inability to bring order to a country ravaged by warlords who get their money from smuggling and drug-running: these are the weak underpinnings of Kabul's new administration. Though Hamid Karzai is de jure head of the new Afghan government and at the moment the understandable toast of Washington, the combination of feudalism, poverty, and lack of a national policing capacity conspire to reduce Karzai to the effective status of mayor of Kabul.

Karzai is an honest, dynamic, and capable man. His first challenge is to project Kabul's influence to the rest of the land. Aside from the some 500 UN peacekeepers who are under the command of British general John McColl, and the 5000 or so troops pledged to secure Kabul by the end of the summer, Karzai has no way to project authority. Even 5000 peacekeepers will not change the fact that the government's authority doesn't extend more than an hour's drive from the capital. The ministers in the interim cabinet, who are geographically dispersed, fight among themselves and raise private armies. Locals are increasingly unlikely to see Karzai as a leader who can protect them and guarantee order -- which is, of course, what brought the Taliban to power in the mid 1990s.

The only leverage Karzai has over the warlords, some of whom are ministers in his new administration, is distribution of aid money. But this forces Karzai into a classic dilemma. If he distributes too much aid to the warlords, he loses his leverage. If he distributes the aid too slowly, the warlords will decide they won't get the cash they depend on, and he loses his leverage. Finally, even if by some miracle Karzai is able to secure the allegiance of the warlords through judicious aid distribution, keeping the money out of their pockets is an entirely different challenge.

Surrounded by water-stained walls, dirty chandeliers and a company of US Marines at the Royal Palace in Kabul two weeks ago, Colin Powell made no apologies for linking delivery of aid to the elimination of corruption. "If any aid is misappropriated," Powell said, "contributions will disappear," a veiled reference to UN grain shipments. Similar concerns echoed through meetings of donors in Tokyo as they discussed the rebuilding of Afghanistan. When James Wolfsensohn, president of the World Bank, was asked how the government in Kabul would get the money to the right places, he scratched his head and said, "The answer is: with difficulty."

So things must change, and clearly dollars, even a lot of them, will not do the job. Western attitudes toward Afghanistan most certainly pose one of the problems. Although the Bush administration enthusiastically went to war, so far it has shown only skepticism about rebuilding Afghanistan, by setting impossibly high standards for a man who, in the end, is alone in a drafty palace with no glass and who relies on firewood to stay warm. Clearly, we need to exceed even President Truman's Marshall Plan, under which the US spent one percent of GNP for four years to prevent Western Europe from slipping back into chaos.

But it's also true that the situation in Afghanistan is different from that of Europe in the 1940s. Germany, Britain, and France all had highly literate, highly skilled populations who enjoyed a high level of political sophistication and a once-well-established market economy. Most Afghans live in conditions not seen in Europe for 600 years. That, coupled with the fact that 70 percent are malnourished, and only slightly fewer are illiterate, creates serious problems for any sort of government, never mind democracy -- which is pretty advanced stuff and, in the end, pretty fragile, as demonstrated by the fate of Germany's Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early '30s.

Besides, the most striking difference between post-World War II Europe and Afghanistan is that there are virtually no foreign troops in Afghanistan. After Europeans watched American armies march across the continent to defeat the Nazi Goliath, they didn't need much persuasion to straighten up and fly right. And to remind them, America left dozens of military bases scattered throughout Europe. No one doubted that if war were to break out again, the US government would be there -- and that it would be upset.

The warlords in Afghanistan think that the US and Europe have grown soft in the last 50 years. Despite Bush's prior statements about ground troops, Afghans believe Americans are only willing to rely on technology to wage war. So far, the minimal commitment of UN peacekeepers to support Karzai has proved them right.

Karzai needs the tools to rebuild his country, and to do that he needs an army to disarm the local tyrants. This is not the time for the West to shy away from its commitment to rebuilding the country for fear of casualties. Terrorists executed 3500 people in the World Trade Center; it seems only appropriate to make sure that they did not die in vain.

Until such time as the West finds its spine, Afghan desperation, combined with a cynicism born of 20 years of war, may end up turning the Bonn agreement into a mere scrap of paper. According to Faizullah Jalal, a professor of international relations at Kabul University, "It is very difficult to keep these groups united for a long time, because they are always working for their self-interest. If it benefits them they'll unite, but if they have nothing to gain, they will start more bloodshed and war in Afghanistan."

MAZAR-E-SHARIF provides a good example of Afghanistan's problems with food distribution in the hinterlands. Here stands out in bold relief Karzai's need for peacekeepers who can help him project federal influence before the rising tensions between local warlords explode into overt warfare.

Like Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif is divided among three competing warlords: General Dostum, who represents the Uzbeks; Commander Mohaqaq, who represents the Hazara tribes; and Commander Uftad Ata, who represents the Tajiks and supports the Rabbani faction. The three can trace their rivalry back to the early 1990s. According to one IRC official who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, "It is absolutely the same situation as before, except they have not yet launched a full-scale attack for fear of the US."

Since there are no peacekeepers on the roads, and there's no fear of reprisal from Kabul, one hears constant concern that grain shipments from Mazar to neighboring villages will be hijacked. One local warlord, Dr. Hekmat of Haza-e-wahdat, has twice "liberated" major grain shipments for his faction, first in early December and a second time this week. Hekmat, who goes by only one name, sent men-at-arms to meet the IRC convoy, removed the drivers at gunpoint, and stole 130 tons of wheat last Monday.

Reached by satellite phone from an undisclosed location, Hekmat revealed through an interpreter that "many receive this grain -- we do not. Dostum, Mohaqiq, and [General] Ata all benefit from distributions, why should we not?"

Unlike Jalalabad, Mazar is further destabilized by the presence of 120,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs). Driven from their villages by a combination of three years of drought and US-led coalition bombing, these Afghans have surrounded the city in about 30 makeshift camps.

Since Dostum had been warned by American advisors to disarm Mazar-e-Sharif, he has found another way to project his power. About a month ago, Dostum started arming ethnic Uzbeks in the IDP camps outside of Mazar. His two rivals quickly followed suit, essentially creating three standing armies just a few kilometers outside the city.

The Sakhi installation outside Mazar-e-Sharif is the only planned camp. Formed about seven months ago by the IRC, the 15,000 person camp has recently been armed by each of the three factions competing for power in Mazar. Those with the guns get the rations, which they distribute to their supporters. Competition between Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Tajiks has forced other minorities out of the camp and created a siege mentality. As one aid worker working in Sakhi put it, "In a way, we are kept hostage by the refugees: if we leave, thousands of innocents die, and if we stay, we support a situation which invites abuse by the violent."

And the violent are running rampant. At least 40 women have been raped in the past three months. Because of the extreme social stigma attached to such victimization, only those women who actually had to receive medical care admitted the crime. The real figure could be five times as high.

Iruma was one of those who admitted to being raped. "I went to get our grain for the day," she says. "One of the gunmen said to my husband, `You have a nice wife.' Then 10 other men came. They took me into a tent nearby and took turns." The men brutally sodomized and raped her over 13 hours. Iruma spent more than eight days in the hospital. "I can't sleep at night anymore," she says, "they come to me in my dreams." When asked about her husband, she could only cry.

Aid workers who try to intervene are threatened at gunpoint. All ask the same question, "When will the peacekeepers come?" Two female aid workers admitted to being threatened by local gunmen armed by Dostum. They say that only the threat of Western reprisals will save them. In the meantime, about 10 children die of starvation each day only a few miles away from storehouses full of grain held by local warlords.

Pleas for demilitarization of the IDP camps go unheeded, as aid workers are threatened at gunpoint. Haneef Ata, the frustration apparent in his deliberate Oxbridge pronunciation, says, "Unless America listens there will be no difference between the Afghanistan of 10 years ago and the Afghanistan of today." And unless the coalition forces and donor nations put their troops where their money is, they risk not only wasting billions of dollars, but of proving Haneef Ata right.

Andrew Bushell reports from Central Asia for a number of publications, including the Economist.

Issue Date: February 8 - 14, 2002