Afghan reconstruction hastened amid Taliban resurgence

"The elections are coming here, and we're in a bit of a race," Zalmay Khalilzad, who on Saturday formally took up the mantle of US ambassador to Afghanistan, said of reconstruction efforts.

Khalilzad is at the helm of what some international diplomats and aid officials in Kabul see as a frantic US effort to hasten reconstruction in the destitute country and reverse a swelling resurgence of the ousted Taliban ahead of national polls next year -- and ahead of the US presidential campaign.

The latest VIP to blow through town was Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who met yesterday with President Hamid Karzai under tight security. Rumsfeld also met yesterday in the north of the country with two key warlords, Abdul Rashid Dostum and Mohammed Atta, who reaffirmed a pledge to disarm their rival militias.

Rumsfeld's visit to the country was his fourth since the fall of the Taliban. Two hours after his meeting with Karzai, a rocket exploded near the US Embassy. No one was hurt, but the blast underscored the threat of violence throughout the country.

The United States says it will inject an extra $1.2 billion into its Afghan programs this year, taking the total bill to more than $1.6 billion for projects ranging from phone systems connecting provincial governments to Kabul to women's education to customs reform. The new policy emerged in August, but the funds won congressional approval last month.

Afghan and foreign officials and aid representatives have welcomed the renewed US initiative, but many are skeptical it will prove enough to ensure lasting recovery and drive back the wave of rebel violence, especially if it is not coupled with a bigger international peacekeeping effort.

"Our concern is that we're going to be so far from an adequate solution that we're not going to arrest the deterioration of the security situation," said Paul O'Brien, advocacy coordinator for Care International. "Nobody's going to sit down and say: `Here's what Afghanistan actually needs.' "

Khalilzad, who continues to hold the position of President Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan, says a high priority is to speed up training of the new army and police forces.

Despite an 18-month-old program to train a centralized, national army run by the United States, Britain, and France, the force numbers less than 6,000. Khalilzad said he hopes to add 4,000 to that force by June and train 20,000 police by November.

Keen to help Karzai extend his writ beyond the capital, the United States says it will help revamp government buildings and send advisers to work side by side with provincial officials. It has earmarked $181 million for rebuilding shattered roads.

A key to the success of a centralized government in Afghanistan is the disarmament of the warlords, whose cooperation with US forces two years ago hastened the end of the Taliban regime.

Rumsfeld said at a news conference with Karzai in Kabul yesterday that he had made it clear to Dostum and Atta that the United States sees the disbanding of regional armies as "an important step for this country."

He said their response was "positive and appropriate."

Meanwhile, the United States is housing its new military commander in Afghanistan, General David Barno, at the embassy, rather than at Bagram Air Base, the headquarters of the US-led coalition. US and other Western diplomatic and aid officials in Afghanistan have said that the coalition's activities are divorced from civilian reconstruction efforts. "We have different instruments of power and influence in Afghanistan, and we want to make sure these instruments are working toward the same goals and objectives in a coordinated, synchronized way," said Khalilzad.

Alarmed by spiraling violence in the southern regions bordering Pakistan, the United States along with the Afghan government last month launched the "south and east strategy," aimed at pumping more aid into the area, supporting the replacement of provincial officials whose political loyalty is dubious, and boosting security with a string of civil-military affairs units known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs.

Reconstruction in the south has stalled following attacks on local and foreign aid workers. Recent hopes that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force would soon start to deploy outside Kabul have faded, as member states did not come forward with money and troops.

The United Nations is in the process of deciding whether to maintain international staff in certain regions following the murder of a French refugee worker in the central city of Ghazni last month and a bomb attack on its main office in the southern city of Kandahar.

Care International's O'Brien, like many aid workers, is doubtful the presence of extra PRTs under the US-led coalition will reopen the south. "The PRTs are still being touted as the best thing for Afghanistan, but nobody's proved that they're capable of providing the ambient security necessary for humanitarian workers to operate," he says. Meanwhile, US hopes that its $1.2 billion aid package would spark a flurry of new commitments from other donors have been disappointed.

"We have to sit back and see: What are we doing here?" one Western diplomat said.

Khalilzad said he would like to see "several hundred million dollars" of new aid from other donors this year. But some diplomats from Western donor countries have said their governments are reluctant to fork over more money for what they believe is an increasingly US-led effort driven partly by US domestic concerns.

Aid representatives question the wisdom of throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at a reconstruction effort that they say must extend far beyond anyone's political horizons. "There's a certain combination of time and assistance that can equal success. The equation doesn't work if you take out time," said one aid worker familiar with US assistance policy. "Five chefs don't boil an egg any faster."

Material from the Associated Press was used in compiling this report.