Hamid Karzai seemed like the perfect leader to head the transitional government of Afghanistan. He was well-educated and media-friendly, with family and extensive experience in the United States. He was a member of a key tribe of the country's Pashtun-speaking majority. He was duly installed as president in December of 2001, and began the job of constructing a post-Taliban nation.

Mr. Karzai is now in deep trouble. The post-Taliban era is on hold because the Taliban, apparently including their one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, are still around. Taliban guerrillas killed more than 30 Afghan soldiers and a Red Cross worker last month, and Mr. Karzai appealed to neighboring Pakistan to crack down on cross-border marauding.

The Afghan President's so-called allies are at least as worrisome as his enemies. Warlords who helped U.S. forces oust the Taliban regime were rewarded with control over vast tracts of territory. They have their own armies and collect their own taxes, which Mr. Karzai has sought in vain to have remitted to the central government. In Herat province, on the Iranian border, governor Ismail Khan has reimposed Taliban-style restrictions on women, including -- according to a recent Newsweek account -- "forced virginity checks." In Kandahar, governor Gul Agha Shirzai is winning notoriety for his corrupt, eccentric ways.

Mr. Karzai holds sway over very little territory outside Kabul, the capital. Even there, he has been forced to make concessions. He welcomed Sima Samar, the courageous physician who became a symbol of women's resistance under the Taliban, into his government as women's affairs minister. They traveled to Washington in January of 2002, for George W. Bush's post-9/11 State of the Union address. But six months later, Mr. Karzai booted Dr. Samar out of the government at the insistence of Muslim leaders, after a false press report said she had rejected Islamic law.

When The Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York visited Afghanistan last August, he found Dr. Samar under siege in her Kabul home, guarded by soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition. She now heads Afghanistan's Independent Commission on Human Rights. In March, she attended the formal opening of a branch of the commission in Herat, and a local news agency reported that Mr. Khan's security forces beat up a radio reporter as the ceremony took place.

That was part of a pattern of attacks on journalists instigated by warlords and Mr. Karzai's intelligence agents, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said this month. The group noted that journalists have been threatened by local commanders with whom U.S. military forces continue to work.

There has been no accounting for the reported atrocities of late 2001. Witnesses have said hundreds of accused Taliban prisoners captured by the forces of northern warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum suffocated in shipping containers and were buried in mass graves. Others fingered by Gen. Dostum were among those who wound up in jail in Guantanamo Bay. Unless someone has too many nightmares and decides to tell us what really happened, we'll probably never find out the truth.

People who travel to Afghanistan, meanwhile, return with tales of a country broken in pieces, with few of the pieces under Mr. Karzai's control. Mr. Bush held out the promise of a brighter future in Afghanistan as a serendipitous byproduct of America's post-9/11 pursuit of self-defense. But for many Afghans, especially outside Kabul, it remains little more than a promise.

U.S. officials are talking about beefing up America's presence in Afghanistan once again. They are even using the dreaded word "nation-building." But according to Marc Kaufman of The Washington Post, they can't decide whether to pour money into building a 70,000-strong army or pay the warlords to help them hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants -- let alone invest in aid that would directly help civilians.

Iraq won't be a replay of Afghanistan; they are very different countries. But Mr. Karzai's wretched experience poses fresh questions about U.S. commitment and staying power. You hear a lot of talk from Washington hawks these days about the virtues of benign imperialism, and from their enemies about Mr. Bush's supposed sinister plans for world domination. Yet what's happening in Afghanistan seems neither benign nor coherent.

It seems the product of shallow strategic vision, spotty follow-through and an almost non-existent grasp of history. If this is Mr. Bush's idea of how to run an empire, he has a bunch to learn.

© 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc

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