A race against time in the new Afghanistan

They are met to ratify a draft of a new constitution, a document painstakingly constructed to balance the contending interests of religion, pluralism, and regional and central authority. They meet in a city that was largely destroyed in civil wars but in which buildings today spring up among the ruins like new teeth in a broken mouth. The loya jirga will inevitably result in an unofficial referendum on the interim government of Hamid Karzai, who if all goes well will be put to the test next June when the country will be asked to elect a new president.

The constitution's framers took pains to craft workable compromises, and although the role of Islam is acknowledged, it will not be given primacy in the country's laws. But when I ran into some of the delegates in the mortar-bomb-shelled sports stadium who were meeting to elect candidates to the loya jirga, they pointed to the sky and said that the word of Allah was their constitution and that Islamic law was His law. It was an indication of the deals and persuasions that will have to be made in the weeks ahead to bridge the old and the new in this long-tortured land.

Karzai, like his country, is in a race against time. Can he in the next six months shed his image as an interim man who leads only as a creature of the Americans? Can he spread his fledgling government's wings outside of the capital and into the provinces where warlords reign? Can reconciliation be achieved with the country's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, who lost influence when the Pashtun-based Taliban regime crumbled? Although Karzai is himself a Pashtun, the picture of the assassinated Ahmed Shah Masood of the Northern Alliance is everywhere in the capital while Karzai's image is relegated to government offices.

Creeping across the borders with Pakistan, the heartland of the Pashtuns who straddle the frontier, there is a growing infiltration of Talibs who seek to disrupt and undermine Kabul's rule. The insurgency targets the most vulnerable: the nongovernmental organizations and United Nations workers. If they are forced to leave the country, the vacuum would be impossible to fill. The Americans and the Afghans are convinced that elements among the Pakistani authorities are helping spread the cross-border insurgency.

As in Iraq, the Bush administration proclaimed the end of major hostilities here too quickly. Security has proven illusory. The United States is paying more attention now, but resources have been pulled away into the ever-widening maw of Iraq. NATO, too, has not been given the means to expand its mission, which the Bush administration is desperate for them to do. America's "bomb first and ask questions later" policy, as one Afghan Cabinet minister put it, is increasingly alienating the countryside, to which the dead bodies of children attest, and America's forces are stretched too thin.

Yet a constitutional process is underway, and a new Afghan Army is being trained. Elections by June may prove overly optimistic, but the process is underway, the warlords are being pressured to surrender power to the center, as Donald Rumsfeld's recent visit emphasized, and a truly Afghan government is beginning to take hold. Enough Afghans still feel more liberated than occupied. Should this balance shift, however, this entire enterprise could go the way of the Russian and British efforts here.

The expression of the people's will going on in a tent on the edge of town is real, but all will depend on America's will to remain engaged for the better part of a decade. The last time the United States turned its back on Afghanistan, the resulting chaos led straight to the World Trade Center's towers.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.