They all want peace and stability but they remain inveterate meddlers.

What a difference a war makes. Last year, the United Nations mustered barely enough money to keep its basic operations going in Afghanistan, raising pitiful sums to combat a lethal drought affecting Afghanistan and Central Asia. This month, it is launching a reconstruction effort projected to cost at least $10 billion. Germany, last week’s host to political talks on Afghanistan’s future government, has offered $70 million. The U.S. has already pledged more than $100 million in humanitarian aid for the region this autumn. And, of course, there is the estimated $1-billion-a-month cost of the war, including small-print allocations to firm up alliances across the region. As the late Sen. Everett M. Dirksen remarked during the Vietnam War, a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there--and pretty soon, you’re talking about real money.

But beware. The best politics that money can buy in Afghanistan and among its neighbors may not be good enough to sustain peace. Indeed, some of the relationships emerging between the U.S. and its anti-terrorism allies in South and Central Asia may extinguish democratic hopes. Serious differences of strategy, policy and politics may risk long-term regional security for the appearance of short-term gain, leaving Afghans and their neighbors perilously enfeebled and at the mercy of local strongmen and outside powers.

Take Central Asia: five cash-poor, weak states--Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan--run by blustering authoritarians, to whom the war on terrorism has given a renewed lease on political life. Turkmenistan’s Saparmurad A. Niyazov’s nearly unlimited powers haven’t helped him peddle the country’s enormous natural-gas reserves, which have been held hostage to Afghan wars and the difficult politics of the Caspian Sea region. Niyazov has spent years promoting various political settlements in Afghanistan in pursuit of Turkmen profit. But his well-documented habits of treating state funds as his personal treasury have made him the scourge of international lenders, and his rights abuses have earned him rogue status in a region marked by misbehavior. Until now, that is, when the war against terrorism has turned the former U.S. foe into useful U.S. friend.

Or Uzbekistan, whose president, Islam Karimov, has catapulted to global importance by offering air bases to the U.S.-led anti-terrorism alliance. Uzbeks have supported elements of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance for years, particularly Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was in charge of the fort where hundreds of imprisoned Taliban fighters were massacred after they staged an uprising. President Bush has now endorsed Karimov’s view that his primary political headache, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), is a terrorist organization of global reach.

The IMU has also contributed to Tajikistan’s civil strife, which tore at the country’s political identity and almost emasculated its bare economy, now overcome by drought. President Emamali Rakhmonov’s balancing act--supporting Tajik-speaking freedom fighters in Afghanistan while fending off Uzbek ambitions at home--has reinforced his overreaching powers. Regional chaos is unlikely to loosen his grip.

These leaders and their colleagues in Central Asia all profess to want peace and stability. But they also maintain closed borders and barely disguised antipathies that work against regional harmony, which is a mainstay of a global campaign against terrorism. America’s goal of a broadly based but non-Taliban government in Afghanistan doesn’t easily mesh with these authoritarians’ interests in carving out spheres of influence that demarcate trade routes and leave room for cross-border meddling. In attitude if not in tactics, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan don’t differ all that much from Pakistan, whose long border with Afghanistan has offered its leaders the illusion that Kabul should take political instructions from Islamabad.

Equally important, Central Asia’s leaders don’t seem seriously interested in sharing power with their citizens. Civil strife in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which civic groups attributed to political repression and their foreign ministers to terrorism, long preceded war in Afghanistan. Democracy advocates have been rightly chagrined to watch basic liberties in these countries take a back seat to show trials and imprisonments, and recent events continue to justify their attitudes. Last week, the leader of Uzbekistan’s only credible democratic opposition party, and the only serious challenger to Karimov, was detained in Europe at the request of Uzbek authorities after he fled harassment at home.

For Central Asia’s citizens, the price of the anti-terrorism war is therefore high. If America’s new alliances in Central Asia stimulate openness in regional politics, then democracy, fairness and justice stand a chance. But if the expedient bargains of war simply validate unfair rule, the effectiveness of the alliances will diminish, and so will the international effort to secure Afghanistan and extirpate terrorism.

America’s alliances in Central Asia parallel its long, strained relationship with Pakistan, an anti-terrorism partner alreading straining at the alliance bit. For three decades, Pakistan’s involvement in Afghanistan has gone hand in hand with its relationships with the West. Pakistan has meddled in Kabul politics to counterbalance its fragile, contentious relationship with India, most blatantly (and with U.S. help) during the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s, and to ensure its place in the queue for foreign aid and diplomatic support. Little wonder that Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who presides over a skidding economy, failing polity and, until recently, pariah diplomacy, was keen to hear British Prime Minister Tony Blair affirm Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan.

The price for Pakistan’s support in the war against terrorism is steep, financially and morally: $1 billion in U.S. contributions; budgetary support organized by the International Monetary Fund; trade concessions from the European Union; a convenient amnesia about the military’s economic mismanagement; a turned cheek concerning Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taliban; and a rosy glass through which to view Pakistan’s potential interference in Afghanistan’s future governance.

The cost to Pakistanis, whose military ruler is now likely to hold power indefinitely? Well, that’s another story. Politicians, economists and most Pakistanis long for a society that is orderly and stable enough to sustain political debate free from threats by thugs, religious groups and private militia that do the army’s bidding in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Until recently, this was not the military’s agenda, and it’s still not clear that it is now, either. Pakistan’s constitution remains in abeyance, the rule of law is personal and political participation is subjected to the army’s interpretation of security and Musharraf’s limited version of electoral democracy. Under these circumstances, Pakistan’s capacity to transform itself into a vital, profitable, democratic political economy is limited indeed. Will our new friends in Central Asia be any different?

Pope Paul VI used to advise those who sought peace to seek justice. For now, however, the U.S. is marching with partners that may be neither agreeable nor reliable and for which justice is a sideshow and peace potentially inconvenient. Relying on our old diplomatic habits isn’t likely to help us exploit the enormous opportunity that misery has provided us--to remove any incentives for anyone to pursue terrorism. Surely, we can find ways to make the effort worth the price.

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Paula R. Newberg is the author of “Politics at the Heart: The Architecture of International Assistance to Afghanistan.”