For Afghan rebuilding, a key year

In its second year of power, and its first real year of outright control, the government of Afghanistan has entered a crucial year that decides whether everything comes together - or falls apart.

If Kabul and other major cities are stable, donor money will flow, refugees will return, and roads will be rebuilt. If the nation remains unstable, aid resources will dry up, and Afghanistan could return to the 12th century conditions prevalent under the Taliban.

"The coming year will be the big challenge," says Maki Shinohara, spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kabul. "The government will be under pressure to show the people that their lives have improved, and for that we need the continued attention of the international community (of donors)."

Aid workers and the new government of President Hamid Karzai are shifting their attention from short-term emergency aid to the longer-term work of rebuilding all those roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals destroyed by war.

But as with last year, the response from donor nations has been tentative this year, Ms. Shinohara says. "If the international community pulls out, it could quickly go back to the war years."

This mixture of optimism and dread is common around Kabul these days. The sheer physical improvements to this country are dramatic, as Afghans rebuild their homes and shops, clear their fields of land mines, send their children to school, and put 23 years of war behind them. But just as striking are the ways in which Afghanistan hasn't changed. Most women still wear burqas; most buildings and roads remain destroyed; many families have no access to schools, health services, safe drinking water, or electricity; most young men don't have jobs; and most of the military leaders who turned the country into a shambles remain on the loose - or in the interim government - reportedly waiting for their moment to strike.

Afghan and international officials here agree that the first building block of any "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan is security. Currently the greatest threat to security, Afghan and US military sources say, is a new alliance of Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Afghan religious extremists, whom Afghan intelligence sources say are regrouping along the long and rugged Afghan-Pakistani border.

"The financial transaction system of Al Qaeda - such as money laundering, charities, and sympathizers - has not been seriously disrupted," says an Afghan official in the intelligence agency, Amniat. As for America's number one enemy, he says, "Osama bin Laden is moving back and forth across the border - our surveillance of him is constant."

But perhaps a more immediate threat than Mr. bin Laden himself is a homegrown terrorist named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The chief of Hizb-I Islami, a religious party that fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Mr. Hekmatyar recently called for a jihad against US forces. Unlike his allies - the Taliban and Al Qaeda - Hekmatyar can offer a motivated and trained network of supporters within Afghanistan. A bombing last September in a crowded Kabul market was a signature Hekmatyar event, Afghan police officials say: First, a small car bomb drew a crowd of shoppers; then a second, larger blast killed more than 30 civilians.

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