The schools the Taliban won't torch: one ingenious aid program is stabilizing the toughest parts of Afghanistan. The U.S. is cutting its funding.

• Author: Warner, Gregory
• Position: National Solidarity Program

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The road from Kabul to Azra, a mountainous district in Afghanistan's central Logar Province, is, in places, not a road at all. At some points it's a rocky riverbed, at others an open desert. For one terrifying stretch, it s a twisty gorge known as the Dubandi Pass, famous for carjackings by Taliban bandits. The steep terrain and treacherous roads have always made this part of the world remote, even by Afghan standards. Tribal ties are stronger than national loyalties, and the unguarded border with Pakistan makes the region an easy access point for insurgents. Azra is the kind of place that both Kabul and Washington worry about most.

As violence has risen, development in this area has floundered. The United States Agency for International Development is funding a much-needed new highway in Azra, but work crews have been repeatedly evacuated because of insurgent threats. This past summer, the murder of two aid workers in a nearby district led Azra's only local nongovernmental organization (NGO) to shut down its office for a month.

But there is one project here that's proceeding relatively unimpeded. One sunny morning in July, I visited a small hydropower facility under construction in the village of Dadi Khel. There I watched a few dozen villagers building a small channel, slapping together stones and mortar beside a riverbank. When the project is finished, river water will spin a turbine that will bring electricity to about 300 village families. It will be enough power to allow those residents to turn on lights, iron clothes, and watch Bollywood soaps--a small advance in the face of their many problems, perhaps, but also the first development project that any villager here can remember. And it's remarkable that it exists at all.

This hydropower plant is possible because of something called the National Solidarity Program, a five-year-old development initiative funded by international donors but administered by the government of Afghanistan. It's the only development program present in some of the country's most remote villages, and it operates on the idea that small infrastructure projects like the turbine in Dadi Khel do more than just turn the lights on. They also give Afghans, including those in regions distant from Kabul, some grounds to feel a stake in the success of their own government--and one more reason to resist the call of the Taliban.

Military efforts continue in Afghanistan, but they alone will not bring stability to the country. What's also necessary for the success of coalition efforts is that the Afghan people begin to feel allegiance to a state. Such allegiance depends in part on the government being able to address some of their most basic concerns. As James Dobbins, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND Corporation, puts it, "It is the development of Afghan institutions that will offer some possibility for the international community to diminish its commitment."

In a country where almost all the recent news has been bad news, the National Solidarity Program, or NSP, offers a rare glimmer of hope. While there are some things the NSP can't do--it can't build national roadways or electric grids, for instance--it can perform at least two vital functions in Afghanistan: bringing small-scale development to volatile areas like Azra, and helping to nurture more accountable local governing bodies. Unfortunately, the NSP is starting to crumble, because the United States won't properly fund it.

The novel thinking behind the National Solidarity Program is largely the work of Scott Guggenheim, a maverick World Bank staffer who in the late 1990s pioneered a similar program in Indonesia. At the time, development work in Indonesia was a thorny...