Afghans find success harder to gauge

Few ever dared dream that Afghanistan, five years after US forces toppled the Taliban, would be Utopia.

But few, also, would have predicted that chronic weak governance, worsening security, and a resurgent Taliban would prompt senior US officials to warn against allowing Afghanistan to collapse again into a "failed state."

The metric for success has changed repeatedly for Afghans, whose high hopes – buoyed in late 2001 by unprecedented promises of Western support – have been repeatedly deflated.

Many feel a familiar foreboding, akin to the disintegration at the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989, which led to years of civil war – and, finally, to more stable Taliban rule.

"My biggest worry is not the Taliban ... but the degree of cooperation of the population with the Taliban," says Homayoun Shah Assefy, a former presidential candidate and strong critic.

"In Maoist terms, they are swimming like fish in a friendly sea.... The gap between the government and the people is widening," says Mr. Assefy. "It's never too late to do good things, but we are moving toward a dangerous situation that is getting worse, not better."

Opium production has soared by nearly half in the past year, to 92 percent of world supply – most significantly in Taliban-heavy provinces of the south, where, many believe, it may help finance the militants. Army and police forces remain weak, and billions in rebuilding have yet to bring steady electricity even to Kabul.

President Hamid Karzai has said that his government, widely perceived among Afghans to be mired in corruption, could not resist a day without 38,000 US and NATO troops there. "The system is not working," says Assefy. "It can't defend itself."

Reversing that trend is proving difficult years after the White House called its efforts a success story. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that Afghanistan must not be abandoned again, as it was after Soviet withdrawal.

"[I]f we allow that kind of vacuum, if you allow a failed state in that strategic location, you will pay for it," said Ms. Rice. "If Afghanistan does not complete its democratic evolution and become a stable state, it's going to come back to haunt us."

But such an evolution has hardly begun, and is endangered – as attacks mount against schools, police stations, and government offices – by spreading Taliban influence. NATO forces, launching what they say is a new hearts-and-minds strategy, have battled for two weeks in the south, and claim to have killed more than 500 insurgents.

"There are two realities in competition: a political reality, of problematic but growing democracy; and a security reality, of the encroaching Taliban and insecurity, and it's like a race between them," says an American analyst in Kabul.

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