In late November, the World Monuments Fund included the fabled minarets of the city of Ghazni, Afghanistan, on its biannual list of the 100 most endangered sites in the world.  Over 80 feet high and elaborately decorated in raised brick with floral and geometric patterns, the two honey-colored towers seem to gather all of the waning light as they stand tall and massive in the blue twilight.  Yet the Fund's alert about their condition indicate that this solidity is largely an illusion and that there are forces at work undermining it.  Escalating events and violence across the entire southern part of the country dramatically illustrate that these towers are not the only things that are imperiled in Afghanistan.

From the inception of the American-led international intervention in Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11 attacks, it has been a given that fighting terror and rebuilding the country are the twin partners of this venture, and the mainstays of a profoundly symbiotic relationship.  It is common knowledge that only the rapid and systematic reconstruction of the nation's war-ravaged infrastructure and economy can generate the popular support necessary for sustaining operations against and warding off the influence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  Only by overawing terrorists can the US create the conditions that will allow this desperately needed rehabilitation to proceed.  Furthermore, all operations military and civil must be undertaken with a high sensitivity to the cultural norms of the Afghans, who possess a fierce sense of both personal and national dignity.  However, the extremely low amount of funds allocated by the Bush administration in its reconstruction efforts, compiled with its heavy-handed conduct during its war on terror, have created a vicious cycle of disillusionment and violence that are undermining any positive outcome of the US intervention in Afghanistan.

AS GOES GHAZNI GOES KABUL
The historically strategic province of Ghazni is located southwest of Kabul - Afghanistan's capital and political center - and is on the way to Kandahar.  It is largely populated by ethnic Pashtuns, the founding and traditionally dominant people of Afghanistan from whom the Taliban drew their main support.  It is said, 'as goes Ghazni goes Kabul.'  Indeed, the storming of the citadel of Ghazni city in July, 1839, by the British during the First Anglo-Afghan War preceded England's occupation of Kabul, which went down without a fight.  The recent publication of a biography of an American adventurer who witnessed their entry, The Man Who Would Be King, by Ben McIntyre, has led to a number of comparisons between that age of imperial force and our own.

According to McIntyre, adventurer and future Civil War colonel Josiah Harlan wrote in his unpublished memoir of 1842, "To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe that force has ever to dread from the...vengeance of a nation outraged, oppressed, and insulted, and desperate with the blind fury of a determined and unanimous will."

Although matters have not yet reached such a critical mass as they eventually did for the British during their occupation, specific areas of concern are increasingly revealing a reality gap between the image of success the Bush administration tries to project about Afghanistan and the actual situation on the ground.  Among them a stalled reconstruction effort; unnecessary civilian casualties during American military operations; a rising tide of criminal violence; and allegations of the abuse of prisoners in American hands.  These have contributed to the growing perception that a misdirected use of force is the defining aspect of the United States' engagement in Afghanistan.

For two years now the reconstruction effort has proceeded at a treadmill pace.  At the beginning of April, the Berlin conference on financial assistance for Afghanistan held under US auspices proved a repeat of its predecessor in Tokyo in early 2002.  Far less aid was pledged than even the most conservative official estimates said would be needed.  While a UN-sponsored study, "Securing Afghanistan's Future," called for a commitment of $28 billion over the next seven years, the Berlin donors offered only $8.2 billion over the next three.  Hard experience during the initial phase of the international engagement following the fall of the Taliban has shown that even what is pledged is not effectively disbursed.  The $4.5 billion committed at Tokyo did not fully materialize in practical application in the field as a result of inefficiency, delays, and security concerns.  All of which have severely limited programs undertaken where they matter most: the countryside in which the overwhelming majority of Afghans live.

The crippling effect of the latter on relief efforts was illustrated in mid-November, 2003, by the brazen assassination by the Taliban of Bettina Goislard, a 29-year-old Frenchwoman working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.  Widely respected among the people of Ghazni for her dedication to alleviating the hardships of returned refugees and astutely calming down tensions arising from local disputes, her murder - in broad daylight in the main bazaar of Ghazni city - immediately precipitated the withdrawal of all foreign UNHCR staff from southern Afghanistan.  This move halted all repatriation efforts in the most vital part of the country for months.

It was the opposite of what Goislard would have wanted.

"Unless the international community begins changing these people's lives for the better soon, they are going to go back to the Taliban," she told me when we spoke in Ghazni in September of 2003.  "Here in Ghazni city there is general support for the Karzai government, especially among the merchants, who are happy about the repaving of the Kabul-Kandahar road.  But out in the remotest parts of the province, where conditions are most desperate, there is a growing anger.  What do these people see of the international community apart from the coalition forces who break down their doors looking for terrorists?  There is a danger that the Americans will come to be seen as just another group of occupiers, who promised help and then did not deliver."

Goislard's concerns were dramatically highlighted a few weeks after her murder, when the latest in a series of US military missteps involving civilian casualties occurred in the village of Hutala, south of the provincial capital.  Nine children and a local man were killed in an airstrike aimed at a Taliban member who, ironically enough, had boasted that he was behind several recent attacks on aid workers.  The same week six children were killed in an attack on a Taliban compound near the eastern city of Gardez in Paktia province.  Sober questions about the tactical wisdom of using such overwhelming and imprecise means against targets pale in comparison to the raw, amorphous rage that such deaths inspire among the Pashtuns of the south.

Indeed it is the phenomenon of "Pashtun alienation" that looms as the greatest threat to the government of President Hamid Karzai and its international backers, a reality carefully delineated in a study released last August by the International Crisis Group (ICG).

"The Pashtun tribal belt," the ICG study stated, "has a high incidence of poverty that feeds criminal activities as well as religious extremism.  The early promises of aid from the US and its allies created high expectations among Pashtuns on the Afghan side of the border.  But little of that aid has materialized in the border provinces, and anticipation is slowly turning into frustration."

YEARNING FOR SECURITY
Formal political discontent centers on the dominance of the transitional government in Kabul by ethnic Tajiks loyal to the assassinated mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Mas'ud.  But the heart of the matter is the perceived culpability of the Pashtun Karzai for the continuing dire conditions in the Pashto-speaking provinces.  Compounding the lack of serious rehabilitation efforts in the south is a return to pre-Taliban lawlessness by both warlords and bandits that leaves many yearning for the iron-handed security once provided by the fundamentalists.

"In southern Afghanistan," the ICG report continues, "arbitrary arrest, torture, and extortion are all common.  Businesses are frequently seized by commanders and their owners thrown in one of many private prisons if they protest.  Shopkeepers and wealthy citizens who are not linked to commanders are often the target of extortion, sometimes being imprisoned and tortured until their families pay the required sum."

Those who are too poor to be noticed by rogue commanders have bandits to worry about.

"I have talked to a lot of people in the provinces," says Col.  Akbar Sherzai, a former mujahideen who served under the legendary commander Abdul Haq and now heads the Foundation for Awareness, Rehabilitation, and Development of Afghanistan (FARDA), a development NGO.  "And they say they're afraid to even paint their houses, for fear that this will be taken as a sign of wealth and they will be robbed."

The Taliban has been quick to exploit such paralysis with a combination of propaganda and violence that all but assures that the vicious circle impeding reconstruction becomes a churning centrifuge that breaks apart any tenuous achievements before they can impact people's lives.  The completion of the repaving of the Kabul-Kandahar road in December was touted by the Bush administration as a great triumph, but its usefulness will be negated if everyone - from merchants to aid workers - fear to venture upon it.  Four Afghans employed by the Danish NGO DACAAR were assassinated on the highway in western Ghazni province a few days before I arrived In September of 2003, and the sense of unease among my traveling companions was palpable.  "Without better security nobody will come for reconstruction, no NGO will come," Haji Asadullah Khaled, the governor of Ghazni, lamented to the Kabul Weekly at the time.

There have been pleas that the presence of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) peacekeepers who have secured Kabul should be extended to the provinces and that the amount and scope of international aid should be vastly increased.  These pleas have been repeated so often over the last two years that they have become annoying - even to those doing the pleading - but the passage of time only increases their urgency.

FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS?
By early June of this year, this urgency had developed into a sense of impending crisis.  The assassination of five staff members of the Nobel-winning NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres in the far northern province of Bagdis added not only to the grim toll of fallen relief workers, but also signaled a dramatic extension of the Taliban's field of operations.  MSF's immediate suspension of all operations in Afghanistan was compounded by the UN's simultaneous halting of voter registration in Bagdis, yet another setback to the increasingly distant prospect that the nationwide democratic elections scheduled for September will be viewed as free and fair.  With only about a third of voters registered so far and widespread reports of political intimidation from a variety of sources ranging from the Taliban to drug lords to rogue commanders, the Afghan constitution proclaimed in Kabul in January seems destined to remain on paper.

Afghans and expatriates in Kabul point out with despair that the September 11 attacks should have been the watershed that definitively demonstrated to the West that it has vital interests in Afghanistan, and should have set into motion a clear course of action for preserving them.  These two disparate worlds are inextricably linked in a common global security nexus; however, despite the traumatically revealing nature of that day, the United States has reverted to a cycle of engagement and neglect that has characterized its Afghan policy since the 1950s.  The series of announcements over the last six months heralding a reconstruction effort to be jumpstarted by Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT's) composed of American and other NATO soldiers have been met with skepticism by experienced observers.

"By March there will be 12 such teams around the country, but they are too small, and there are too few of them, to provide security to the Afghan population," longtime Afghanistan correspondent and author of Taliban Ahmed Rashid wrote in the Nation in January.

At this point, they say, such reconstruction work will have to be aggressive and the soldiers' dealings with the rural population light-handed, if the disastrous pattern of the last two years is to be reversed.

Recent incidents show no sign of the latter.  In early May a furor erupted when the Americans distributed leaflets in the south threatening that if people did not provide information on the Taliban and al-Qaeda to coalition forces, they would face a loss of humanitarian aid.  The outrage among aid organizations who said the tone of the fliers endangered their safety while working amongst a people with strong ideas about "nang", or honor, led to their rapid disavowal by the Pentagon.

ALLEGATIONS OF ABUSE
Not so easily removed as an affront to honor are the allegations which surfaced at that same time, citing US forces engaging in abuses of prisoners similar to those in Iraq.  These included reports of beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, and homicide.  Specific accusations made by a former Afghan police colonel of Pashtun descent from Gardez - that he was abused before being totally cleared of all connections with terrorists - are rapidly creating a sense that the US's behavior in Afghanistan is capricious.  Coupled with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion cases  in Abu Ghraib, it is become clearer that such conduct is most likely pervasive.  The introduction of this element into a profoundly conservative society already exasperated by what it sees as a pattern of having been lied to by the Americans is potentially explosive.  Even US officials acknowledge this.

"Our investigation is proof that we are concerned about these things," US spokesman Lt.  Col.  Tucker Mansager told reporters in Kabul when announcing a probe into the charges.  "Our center of gravity is the Afghan people.  When allegations like this come to light, that can affect that center of gravity and we take that very seriously."

It is hard to visualize that center holding.

Wandering amidst the worn and battered buildings of Ghazni city along garbage-strewn streets, one sees ragged and dirty children run by, scarred by leishmaniasis lesions.  In the glory days of the Ghaznavid Empire that raised the now-endangered minarets almost a thousand years ago, Ghazni was a world center of learning, in whose great libraries and enchanted gardens the epic poet Firdausi and the encyclopaedist al-Biruni labored and rested.  As the resurgent Taliban gathers in the surrounding mountains, it becomes harder to imagine that these kids will have a chance to emulate the great achievements that these minarets embody, as they have been promised so often over the last 30 months.  What that means for the West should be clear to anyone who remembers the immediate post-9/11 resolve - that the perpetrators of those atrocities should never again enjoy state protection.

Perhaps the terrorists will return, and in the course of violence or neglect bring these two towers crashing to the ground.

They have done such a thing before.