In the shade of a canvas tent, Bilqees and 30 other girls in her second-grade class clutch gifts from America. One little girl writes in her notebook with a No. 2 pencil. Another scribbles with chalk on a chalkboard. And Bilqees, a bubbly green-eyed 12-year-old, pulls out a jump rope from her bag.

All the supplies came from America's Fund for Afghan Children, donated by kids in the US to the American Red Cross. Giving by the fund already exceeds $10 million.

Across Afghanistan, donations like these school supplies are making a difference in the lives of Afghans. But for every school that receives supplies from an international aid group, there are hundreds that do not.

At the Tokyo donor conference in January, the world's richest nations – including the US, Britain, the European Union, and Japan – pledged to give $1.8 billion in aid by the end of this year. The US stands out as the single largest donor to Afghanistan, with all of its promised $280 million already delivered, and another $250 million coming next year.

But overall, only $570 million has actually been delivered, putting many long-term projects on hold. The pace of aid is dangerously slow, local officials, aid workers, and village chiefs say, because after the fall of the Taliban, Afghan expectations were exceedingly high.

"The reaction of the donor nations was not bad, but [the] needs of Afghanistan are phenomenal," says Aidan Cox, a UN official on loan to the Afghan Assistance Coordination Authority under the Finance Ministry. "Afghanistan is ... a country on the edge of the abyss. So you don't need a normal response, you need an exceptional response."

Amassing billions of dollars in aid takes time, foreign donors say, and most democratic governments demand scrutiny of how the money is spent. But Afghan officials say their country doesn't have much time. If the world's rich nations dawdle, the mood will quickly turn into a backlash against President Hamid Karzai's fragile central government and the American-led coalition that promised to rebuild the country.

"For the ordinary men and women, the key issues that make a difference in people's lives are these: How long does it take to get home from work? Is there clean drinking water? Is there electricity?" says Ashraf Ghani Ahmedzai, Afghanistan's finance minister, giving an interview in his car on the way to a meeting with Mr. Karzai. "These are my measures for deciding what our priorities should be and where the money should go."

By those measures, Afghanistan has a long way to go. It has one of the lowest levels of development in the world. The situation is worst for rural Afghans: 95 percent have no access to safe drinking water, and 83 percent have no access to medical care. Only 32 percent of the adult population can read

Turning these numbers around will take time – to dig new wells, train more doctors and nurses, and build new clinics and hospitals, schools and roads. Afghan officials have groused that most of the aid has gone to short-term humanitarian relief. Only one-third of this amount, around $150 million, has been devoted to reconstruction.

"The question is making sure that reconstruction gets as much attention as emergency aid, so we can deal with both the symptoms and the causes of Afghanistan's problems," Mr. Ahmedzai says.

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