Afghan Fragments

A Professor Survives, And Other Surprises

GARDEZ, Afghanistan

The last time I saw Hakim Taniwal, I thought he was a dead man walking.

A slight, aging sociology professor with gentle manners, Taniwal returned to his homeland from exile in Australia after the fall of the Taliban to help build a new Afghanistan. When I ran across him in the spring of 2002, he had been dispatched by Hamid Karzai, the new Afghan president, to the untamed frontier to take over as governor and dislodge a brutal local warlord who ruled over these parts. Taniwal had no guns, no army and seemingly no chance. It seemed like a suicide mission.

When I saw him again here two weeks ago, he was sitting in the provincial governor's office and the warlord was somewhere in the countryside, out of power, his militia largely disbanded. I reminded Taniwal of our first meeting, when he could not even get into the governor's house because it was occupied by the warlord's family and dozens of his thuggish guerrillas, bristling with Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers.

Taniwal looked at me and smiled. "Things have changed," he said with satisfaction.

Indeed they have -- and yet, in so many ways they haven't.

Four years ago this weekend, the United States launched its war to topple the Taliban. Along with my wife and fellow correspondent, Susan Glasser, I spent eight months shuttling in and out of Afghanistan to cover the conflict and its aftermath. At the end of last month, I returned to cover a trip by President Bush's national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

Most Americans could be forgiven if they've forgotten that we are still heavily engaged in Afghanistan, overshadowed as it has been by the turmoil in Iraq and the devastation back home along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But amid a continuing low-grade war against resurgent Taliban forces and the fruitless search for Osama bin Laden, an audacious experiment in nation-building is underway. The final results of the experiment are not in, but they will carry vital lessons for the reach and limits of American power in a new era.

The Bush administration would love to portray Afghanistan as the picture of progress, and there are certainly encouraging, even inspiring developments. Compared to the daily horrors in Iraq, Afghanistan seems a model of stability to many U.S. officials. "Coming here from Iraq, this is like a vacation," said a State Department official who has worked on reconstruction in both places.

At the same time, even the most optimistic Americans here acknowledge that the job of stabilizing Afghanistan is nowhere near finished, and they worry that it might come unraveled again if a distracted Washington averts its attention too soon. It is not easy to wrench a collection of disparate city-states out of the Middle Ages and turn them into a unified, democratic 21st-century nation in four short years. "What we have taken on is to try to create a state that has never really existed," said a U.S. diplomat here. "It isn't going to happen quickly. You've bit it off and now you've got to chew it for a long time."

Taniwal offers a telling case study of the contrasts behind every corner in Afghanistan. Against all odds, through peaceful perseverence he outlasted warlord Bacha Khan in his home city of Khost, from which the ruthless commander lorded over three provinces. But now based in the town of Gardez as governor of one of those provinces, Taniwal presides over a rugged area south of the capital Kabul with precious few tools. He welcomes visitors into an office with no electricity except for the couple of hours when his small old generator runs each evening. The World Bank gave him a powerful new 480-kilowatt generator, but it has sat unused behind his office for the past year because his government has no money to pay for the fuel to run it.