The other war: Afghanistan was the first battlefield in the war on terror. Is its struggle to rebuild suffering from neglect now that Iraq is in the spotlight?

• Author: Gall, Carlotta
• Position: International

Just off a busy street in Kabul stands the skeleton of a two story shoe factory with mounds of rubbish piled outside. Like so many bombed-out buildings in Afghanistan's capital, it is now home to hundreds of displaced people who have nowhere else to go.

Three hundred people have camped out here for 18 months, but the owner recently returned from abroad and is demanding they leave. "He wants to repair the building and sell it," says Kher Mohammad, who has been living in a room on the second floor with his wife and five children. "We don't know what will happen to us."

Their story is not unique, and it illustrates one of the paradoxes involved in rebuilding a country as devastated as Afghanistan: With the country finally at peace (for the most part), reconstruction is tinder way, but for some people, things may get worse before they get better.

It has been two years since the U.S. and its allies launched the war on terror with an offensive in Afghanistan. That attack ousted the repressive Taliban regime, which had ruled for five years with a brutally strict version of Islam. At that time, the U.S. and its allies promised they would rebuild Afghanistan.

TWO DECADES OF WAR

Now, as the U.S. focuses on rebuilding Iraq, the American experience in Afghanistan is getting renewed scrutiny "There's been so much criticism of the U.S.'s short attention span," says Fiona Hill, a central Asia expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "I think there really is a realization in the Bush administration that Afghanistan has got to be kept in the spotlight or it will augur very badly for U.S. operations in Iraq."

But Afghanistan has a very different history than Iraq, and 24 years of invasion, civil war and brutal oppression have left much of the country in ruins. The Soviet Union invaded in 1979 and fought a 10-year war against Afghan guerrillas known as mujahideen. Soviet bombing forced more than 3 million people to flee their homes and the country. The U.S. saw the mujahideen as allies against the Soviet Union, its Cold War enemy, and backed them with $2 billion in weapons, supplies and cash.

When the Soviets withdrew in defeat in 1989, the U.S. drastically cut its involvement. The result: Afghanistan descended into civil war, as different factions battled for power. Much of Kabul was destroyed, and parts of the country became utterly lawless. In 1996, the Taliban took power and provided a safe haven for terrorist groups like AI Qaeda.

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