Tribal Leaders Make Their Way to Capital

Haji Abdul Qadir climbed into his white Toyota Land Cruiser with darkly tinted windows Friday and set off on the six-hour drive to Kabul, taking with him an armful of documents and enough soldiers to take on a small army.

Qadir, the governor of Nangarhar province, is expected to play a prominent role in Hamid Karzai’s interim government that will be sworn in today in the capital, officially ending the brutal five-year rule of the Taliban. He does not underestimate the challenges ahead.

“We pray to God we will succeed in bringing unity and peace,” he said outside Governor’s House, where his convoy sat with idling engines. “There are problems, so many problems, but we must not lose this opportunity. If we do, what will become of Afghanistan?”

Across Afghanistan, scores of leaders were headed toward Kabul. They were men--and, in a handful of cases, women--who represented different ethnic groups, different interests and different visions of the future. But they shared a great common denominator: They were citizens of a country that, after 23 years of war, three years of drought, an eternity of corruption and mismanagement, and neglect by the outside world, was beset by a disaster of African proportions.

“You see what’s happened here, and you can’t help thinking of Somalia, Angola, southern Sudan,” a Western aid worker said. “Certainly the Afghans and, say, the Angolans have the same dreams--peace, an education for their children, the chance for economic betterment. I guess I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that humanity everywhere has the same desires--and the same ability to mess them up.”

Aid workers are by no means certain that Afghanistan can be saved from itself and its tribal rivalries. Nor does there appear to be any quick fix for the minefield of problems that awaits the new leaders.

One of every four Afghan children dies before age 5. Half the adults can’t read or write their names. Thirteen million land mines scattered across the country kill or wound 500 people a month. Drought has cut agricultural production in half. Eighty-five percent of the teachers have left the country or been killed. Most of the doctors have joined 4 million Afghans living outside their homeland, and those recently trained here aren’t professionally fit to practice, foreign health officials say.

Faisal Karem, who runs a small brick factory on the outskirts of Jalalabad, a trading center for three provinces, hadn’t heard about the Kabul gathering. His city has no telephone service, no newspaper and receives no national radio or television broadcasts.

He does know, though, that the hated Taliban and its terrorist guests, Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, have been shattered, if not destroyed, and that Afghanistan stands at a crossroads.

“Before the Russians attacked us, before the Taliban came, business conditions were better,” he said. “We shipped bricks all over the province. Not anymore.

“But if we can have stability, the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] will come back and they will build clinics and do construction, and instead of having eight workers, maybe I will need 16.”

The irony of Karem’s comment is that the Taliban did bring stability. But the price the Afghans paid for it was repression.

Women were considered disposable creatures whose primary roles were reproduction and housecleaning. Music and movies were banned. Men could not cut their beards. Girls could not go to school. Landlocked, Afghanistan became a lost frontier, off limits even to backpackers. The isolation led to decay, and the decay to deeper isolation.

Abdul Ghafar, Jalalabad’s mayor, was at his desk Friday, with many concerns. He placed his right hand over his heart in a traditional Afghan greeting and offered tea to his visitors. He shook his head and remained in thought for a moment when asked what Jalalabad’s priorities would be if Afghanistan had the luxury of stability and individual freedom.

“Almost everything,” he finally said. “We need to clean the city. It’s filthy. We need to build roads. They are broken. I need salaries for my staff. They’ve been paid only once in six months, and that’s because I paid them personally with my own money. And guns. There are too many guns. The cities are safe, but the countryside is wild, lawless.”

What he would like to see emerge from the formation of a government in Kabul is a promise that Jalalabad will receive development funds. That money, Ghafar knows, would have to come from international donors, who are ready to pour billions into Afghanistan if there is a peaceful environment in which to work.

His hope is that the West, particularly the United States, won’t walk away as it did after the Soviet Union was defeated and withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.

“Right now,” said Hafiz Ullah, a professor of medicine at Jalalabad University, “the Afghan people are glad to be rid of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But if the United States walks away, that could create conditions for them to return. Of that I am 100% certain.”