Rebuilding amid Afghan disorder

A disturbingly similar pattern may now be appearing here, as well. Last week, two storehouses belonging to the World Food Program were looted. In a country where at least one-fifth of the population goes hungry each night, such thefts may be understandable, but should not stand, aid experts say.

The loss of food is less important that what it represents: lawlessness, and the interim government's as-yet unmet need to prove that it - not regional fiefdoms and random gunmen - is in control.

Mukesh Kapila, head of the Conflict and International Affairs Department at Britain's national aid agency, says donor countries will be searching for signs that funds and food are able to reach people in need without interference. "This will not happen without a strategic improvement in security," says Dr. Kapila, speaking in Islamabad, Pakistan, after his assessment mission to Afghanistan. "Undoubtedly, there is an uphill struggle ahead."

Donor skepticism does not come without cause. In recent years, efforts to help rebuild other countries after years of conflict - whether international or internecine - have often been a let-down. In Cambodia, for example, international peacekeepers and aid allocations failed to stop the return of political corruption and the disregard for democratic elections.

Will Afghanistan be different? Kapila says it can, by learning from the mistakes elsewhere. "In East Timor, it took a year for the first dollar to be converted into cash. That's not going to happen in Afghanistan," he says.

Getting money to Afghanistan, however, is no easy feat. There is no functioning banking system, just an unofficial network of money-changers and black market movers. The Taliban looted the central bank's vault before fleeing Kabul. Exchange rates are different in various parts of the country, and the Afghani soared in value after the Dec. 5 Bonn Agreement was signed. That means that the dollars promised to Afghanistan in Germany in December are only worth about a third to a fourth what they were a month and a half ago.

The aid that has been injected thus far is in part responsible for driving up prices of basic items, putting them out of reach of people whose incomes have not improved - if they have incomes at all.

"If you suddenly input several millions of dollars, you are injecting it in urban economies and it affects the prices of essentials," says Kapila. "We don't want to make matters worse for the majority by funding the minority."

The mere task of prioritizing will be enormous. Electricity, phone lines, fuel, sanitation, and clean water, are all in short supply or nonexistent. Then, there's demining a nation so booby-trapped that farmers are afraid to plow their fields. And the education system was practically destroyed by five years of Taliban rule. Some 1.5 million children are to return to school this March after the long winter break, but the nation's schoolteachers have not been paid in six months. Some 90 percent of Kabul University's library books were destroyed - in large part by the Taliban, who opposed subjects from science to Western literature as un-Islamic.

Sharif Faez, minister of higher education, says he is trying to hold "rehabilitation classes" for women who were kept home from class under the Taliban. But even funding for that, he said in a recent interview, had not come through.

"We're trying to get some funds to heat a few rooms so we can have some classes," says Mr. Fayez, a former literature lecturer who was living in Virginia when he got a call in December, informing him that he had been made a minister. "The UN has promised a lot, but nothing has really been provided yet."

Afghan officials say they want to make a departure from past policies of state-run economics, and allow the private sector and market forces to call the shots. That should include assistance in tapping into Afghanistan's capacity for oil production, says Haji Abdul Qadir.

Then, the country could have revenues and a tax base for him to get on with his job as minister for city planning. When he obtains a budget, Mr. Qadir hopes to spend it on basics like a sewage system, which is missing from much of Kabul.

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