KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- Assassination, like self-deception, is not a typical governing tool. However, in Afghanistan these days, both are common.

Almost a year after September 11, well into the second stage of the Bonn agreement, which called for a two-step process toward peace in Afghanistan, Afghans continue to assassinate each other while the United Nations and American forces sound tired as they continue to tell the public that everything will be better soon.

The Bonn accord sketched a framework whereby through two intermediary regimes, Afghanistan could prepare for democracy. The first regime was called the Interim Authority. Though headed by Hamid Karzai, a southern Pashtun leader from Kandahar, the Interim Authority largely reflected the state of things when the US ground campaign ended, with the Tajik-headed Northern Alliance in control of Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul. The three most important ministries -- foreign, interior and defense -- were headed by Tajik leaders from the Panjshir Valley, a tiny geographic region north of Kabul. These men had roughly the same role in the Northern Alliance.

The second stage, inaugurated a little more than two months ago, is the Transitional Government. Rather than the product of a council of elites, the Transitional Government was to be created through an Emergency Loya Jirga, or representatively elected tribal assembly. The Loya Jirga was supposed to be the vehicle though which the Afghans themselves would cast off the warlords and breathe freedom.

It wasn't. Very little actually changed. The Panjshiri's still control the Defense, Interior, and Foreign ministries. Although a Pashtun is the interior minister he has not been able to hire any loyal subordinates and was prevented from entering office for at least three weeks by underlings of the outgoing minister. There has been a ministerial-level assassination or attempted assassination each month since the Panjshiris have assumed power. The Pashtun minister for civil aviation, Abdul Rahman, was stabbed to death on a flight to Saudi Arabia on February 14. Implicated in the assassination were more than 20 members of the Interim Authority, including the head of the intelligence ministry, Abdullah Tawhedi; the deputy minister of defense, Qalander Big; and a member of the Supreme Court, Justice Haji Halim. The minister of defense was also suspected of being involved, though no one would dare to implicate him.

In mid March, as the motorcade of interim defense minister Mohammad Fahim traveled through Jalalabad, four people were killed when a charge detonated nearby in an assassination attempt. On July 6, Haji Abdul Qadir, a vice-president of the Transitional Government, governor of Jalalabad, and minister of public works, was shot dead when his Toyota Landcruiser was riddled with bullets as he arrived for his first day of work in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped an assassination attempt via a car bomb less than three weeks after accepting US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad's gift of American special-forces soldiers to serve as his close-protection team.

While the return to tribal violence and vendettas is best illustrated by the assassinations and assassination attempts, they're not the only proof that the Afghan government created by the Bonn agreement is failing. The central government has achieved no success in getting warlords who control important trade routes into the country to turn over customs revenues. In fact, the government has no authority besides moral suasion outside Kabul -- something that carries little weight with the non-Panjshiri and non-Northern Alliance warlords. Widespread corruption and election tampering remains. (One UN monitor was almost stoned to death -- he got away with only a few lumps.) And Panjshiri police and interior-ministry personnel routinely stop cars entering Kabul to "tax" members of other ethnic groups by taking produce and money at gunpoint.

Despite the best efforts of the American foreign-policy machine's spin doctors and UN officials, the Transitional Government of Afghanistan, ripped apart by tribal rivalries, with no real source of income, and little political legitimacy, is clearly on the rocks. And American foreign policy in Afghanistan, while admittedly self-serving, should not be shortsighted; Muammar al-Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden were all creations of the American-diplomacy machine, and Hamid Karzai should not become the latest in the succession.

The one entity capable of dealing with the situation is the United Nations. The UN, after all, pulled the Bonn participants together. Eager to avoid a confrontation with a still-shocked and angry American government and its allies, the UN pressured key Afghan warlords and tribal elders to meet last October in Bonn, Germany, to discuss which steps would allow Afghanistan to return to normalcy after 23 years of war. Even so, the UN doesn't have the spine to address the failings of the government formed under the Bonn agreement forthrightly. The institutional self-deception of both American policymakers and UN staff has created fertile ground for future factional warfare. While only time will tell, the elements are certainly volatile -- something Americans surely don't want a month away from the anniversary of September 11.

THE PROBLEMS created by the Northern Alliance's capture of Kabul are easy to see. Perhaps it would be instructive to re-play Afghanistan's recent history. The Taliban, mostly ethnic Pashtun educated in religious schools within the Pakistani tribal areas, came to power as a remedy to the massive corruption of the previous nationalist regime. As the Taliban folded under the American military onslaught, the Northern Alliance, an all but defeated rag-tag group of nationalist mercenaries holed up near the Uzbek border, took over. The Northern Alliance is composed of many of the same people that ran the nationalist regime prior to the Taliban. And, as the head of America's Operation Enduring Freedom, General Tommy Franks, commented after the Alliance captured Kabul, "they're no choirboys, either."

So the thugs who were kicked out of Kabul by the massive popular uprising that installed the Taliban, have returned. And thugs being thugs, murder, rape and high-stakes political intrigue plague Kabul once again.

To be sure, the Taliban were no picnic either -- just ask those Afghan women who wanted an education -- but the fact remains that more women were educated under the Taliban than under the previous, largely Northern Alliance regime. If the Taliban cultivated vicious religious intolerance, they were not thieves -- nor were they capricious. Sick, wrong, deluded, and murderous, but there was a rhyme to their madness.

Now, chaos -- the same corruption and chaos that made the peasants beg for the Taliban -- threatens Afghanistan once again, and there are neither Soviets, fascists, nor religious bogeymen to blame for it.

Tribal rivalry in Afghanistan is best understood by analogy. Imagine gang warfare in Los Angeles -- the Crips and Bloods fighting it out. But rather than selling crack on street corners, gun-running on the black market, and occasionally bribing the LAPD, these two gangs supply over 70 percent of the world's heroin with no tampering from a policing agency. And over the past 23 years, foreign governments have given them all the weapons they want.

But how could such a situation -- where tribal and political rivalries could turn so deadly -- arise in the new Afghanistan? First, American foreign policy, at the behest of President Bush over the objections of several career foreign-service officers in the region, has shied away from the true nation-building that Afghanistan requires lest it slip back into a quagmire of factional fighting. Second, the United Nations provides the megaphone to America's bully pulpit. Rather than take an independent view, the UN has served to underline and emphasize American policy in the region -- most recently by going along with an American request not to rock the boat with the investigation of mass graves in Mazar-i-Sharif presumed to be Taliban prisoners executed en masse by indigenous American allies.

Citing "security concerns," United Nations officials and peacekeepers brief American military officers at critical moments, not only on Afghan politics, but on dissident Afghan factions that have nothing to do with the war on terror. When the American military machine in Afghanistan looks to support one warlord over another, the UN Assistance Misson for Afghanistan (UNAMA) makes a point of muffling the criticism of other Afghan groups by threatening a reduction of aid, according to UN monitors who observed elections leading up to the Loya Jirga.

According to one highly placed and well-informed source in UNAMA, "while we don't like [the Americans], Afghanistan, like politics, makes strange bedfellows -- and we go to sleep with them every night and wake up with them every morning." It's not really that the UN is deferential to the US, it's just that the US has all the chips, so to speak (money, military assets, the bully pulpit, etc.) and the UN doesn't.

So far, the US acts like the 800 pound gorilla in the region. But the United Nations should realize that it is another sleeping giant -- since the it distributes most of the money donors have supplied for the rebuilding of Afghanistan, the UN's power of the purse is massive. American military forces and the United Nations necessarily share a complicated relationship -- they must coordinate their plans or risk falling over each other. However, in attempting to keep out of each other's way, these large institutions are sidestepping responsibility for stability in Afghanistan. Whenever the UN has been unable to fulfill its mission to facilitate political stability and rebuild Afghanistan, "security concerns" are cited. When the US is criticized for not contributing to stability in the region, the American military says politics is the province of diplomats. The diplomats, meanwhile, say that the major players in the region are the military officials -- or refer everything to Washington. The resulting mess is a house of cards built on self-deception, something worthy of Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

THAT SAID, THE United States and the United Nations each have strong interests in the region and in seeing the Afghanistan experiment succeed. The US, obviously, has strong military and political interests in Afghanistan. Militarily, Afghanistan provides a convenient venue for launching an air campaign against Iraq if Saudi Arabia and Turkey become problematic. Though it has muted its criticism recently, Saudi Arabia has made a point of stating that it will not allow American airfields in the monarchy to serve as a base for attacks against another Arab country. Turkey, the current source of peacekeepers in Afghanistan, is more politically fragile now than ever, given the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the isolation of Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit's coalition. While the current Ecevit government would do anything for membership in the EU, it might fall soon, opening the way to a host of conservative Islamic parties who would be more interested in aligning Turkey with an Islamic Middle East rather than a secular Europe.

As one highly placed military official in Afghanistan puts it: "One day, either Turkey is going to wake up and realize that it gets more by constantly needing to be bought, or, and this is more likely, Europeans are going to realize that no matter its strategic importance as a gateway to Europe -- Turkey is not European. Either way, despite a small police action in Kabul, we can't count on Turkey for military support against other Muslims."

Meanwhile, the United Nations, once a forum for debate during the Cold War, a place where Khrushchev could bang his shoe and get a hearing, is still trying to justify its existence in a world where American strong-arm diplomacy can forge coalitions -- making a UN imprimatur irrelevant. A victory of peace and development in Afghanistan could go a long way toward shoring up the UN's reputation and better positioning it as an actor in the international political issues that are sure to shape the century.

It's a bit dumbfounding that neither the US nor the UN has adopted policies that would further its aims in the long run. Seemingly in sync with their failures, these two bumbling players in Afghan politics repeat two key phrases that have damned prospects for peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan: "we are not involved in nation-building" and "we must tread with a light foot."

The first comment, uttered after the fall of Kabul by George W. Bush and later picked up by Tony Blair -- perhaps provides the most insightful entrée into America's self-deception. The proclamation has forced the Bush presidency, like the American Catholic Church, to say one thing while covering up the fact that it's doing another with an alacrity that would make Cardinal Law proud.

As Jonathan Chait recounted in "The Peculiar Duplicity of Ari Fleischer" for The New Republic in June, during a White House briefing some months ago a journalist asked Mr. Fleischer if the Bush administration's plan to create sustaining structures to support the education, health care, and welfare of the Afghan people meant that Mr. Bush had finally warmed to nation-building as good policy. In response, Fleischer stated that Mr. Bush had never criticized nation-building and has always been for such things as health, education, and welfare, even though in the second presidential debate candidate Bush hammered then vice-president Gore with, "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building." The journalist was so shocked, he sat down.

In fact, America isn't involved in rebuilding Afghanistan. And the few American officials who are nipping around the edges of Afghanistan's problems by helping reconstruct a school here or an orphanage there aren't even really all that interested in letting reporters, let alone Afghans, know what they're up too. The Joint Civil Military Operations Task Force (JCMOTF), cipher for American nation-building efforts, has a media office at the Mustafa Hotel in Kabul. Often the office is empty and locked -- sometimes for weeks at a time. In fact, the office only started to open on a semi-regular basis when the restaurant at the Mustafa added pizza and lasagna to the menu. Perhaps the reason why they hide from view is that they're embarrassed -- building a school in Kabul and an orphanage in Herat is not nation-building, it's teasing.

As for the second comment -- "we must tread with a light foot" -- it's frequently uttered by Lakhdar Brahimi, the special representative of the secretary general of the United Nations, when talking about the UN mission in Afghanistan. Apart from helping to lend credibility to the first puppet government, the Afghan Interim Authority, the "light foot" doctrine damned the democratic process in Afghanistan even before it got off the ground during the June elections of the Loya Jirga, and all but ensured that the Afghan Transitional Government, like it's predecessor, would end in failure.

International observers who returned to Kabul after the local elections in May and June called the elections "rigged" and "corrupt." They derided the UN's decision to pull out the logistical support that would have allowed for effective monitoring. Not only were there widespread allegations among international monitors that Northern Alliance factions within Hamid Karzai's Interim Authority intimidated villagers and rigged elections, but despite having one monitor stoned and another threatened with rape -- the UN enforced a gag order on the monitors.

"We were not there to monitor elections, we were there to be there and by our presence to give the impression that the election was fair," said Dr. Cornelius Reitveld, a Dutch observer who has been working in Afghanistan since 1987.

Dr. Micheal Pohly, director of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a non-governmental organization (NGO) for the promotion of democracy aligned with Germany's Social Democratic Party, says the United Nations "knows quite well that it has a problem. You have to cancel between 50 and 60 percent of all the elections -- they are faked -- and this is the lower limit; some Afghans say you have to cancel all of the elections. You have had no chance in the northern parts, no chance, you have had no chance in Herat, no chance in the region directly in Kandahar, Logar, Konar."

In fact, the UN had already started to distance itself from the elections before they even began. The observers, who were subcontracted through the Asia Foundation, an NGO based in San Francisco that works in the Asian Pacific region, were initially to be credentialed UN election observers. On arrival in Afghanistan, though, those chosen by the Asia Foundation were told that they would be, "international monitors."

The monitors were given a series of identification cards that seemed to serve no purpose other than to distance the work of the monitors from the UN. According to one UN observer who declined to be named, "Initially some of us had the UN flag [on the card], then it went. Some of us had the UN oversticker, then that went. . . . Even with the ID cards, there was an attempt to put a little distance between the observer mission and UNAMA."

When asked about the fairness of the elections, the director of secretariat for the Special Commission for the Convening of the Emergency Loya Jirga, Dr. A. Aziz Ahmad -- a native of Kabul who lived in America for 18 years -- simply shrugged and said, "We are only here to process complaints about election irregularities, the 21-member Loya Jirga Commission makes the decisions. We also send a copy to the United Nations. There is no money to investigate all of the charges of corruption."

In the meantime, in Mazar-i-Sharif warlords were allowed to intimidate both the electors and UN staffers. "One of the rules was no arms," says Reitveld. "Everybody was searched. In walks [General Rashid] Dostum with six armed, huge, Turkish bodyguards . . . everybody [from the UN] was there." Dostum's contingent, "walked in the Anhoy tent, the Sheberghan tent, and the whole Dostum leadership was in. Basically the signal that it sent was that commanders like Dostum were above the law."

The bottom line? "This thing is like a soufflé, it's nothing, it doesn't really matter what is going on -- it's theater," says Reitveld of the current Afghan government. "The Loya Jirga is about what is going on in Kabul -- Kabul-ki Theater. It's all about self-deception."

Assassination. Self-deception. These are the precepts of the new government in Afghanistan.

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

Issue Date: August 30 - September 5, 2002