By GRAHAM REID
When you think of Afghanistan you don't think of a television game show - you probably don't think of television at all.
Guns and ammunition belts, tribal warlords and American troops, towering mountains where Osama Bin Laden might, or might not, still be hiding. This is the Afghanistan of
our imaginings, brought to us, admittedly with less frequency these days by news reports.
But they do have a game show in Kabul on the recently resurrected television service. Azmonga Zehni (Test Your Brain) is back on air after a six-year absence when the Taleban banned it, and all other television programmes.
Of course, this being Afghanistan, the prizes are modest: shampoo, toothpaste, cooking oil and clip-on ties are about as good as it gets.
But its mere presence is an indication life is returning to normal, although normal is a relative word in a country that has suffered 23 years of war and civil disorder.
This is a factionalised land, where men are often armed to the teeth but which has no standing army to speak of. It is where rival warlords - many in the pay of the United States and commanding hundreds, often thousands, of men - sit across a cabinet table from a new interim President they neither want nor like.
Suspicion and corruption are endemic, and the nation is divided along tribal, ethnic and political lines.
Late this week President Hamid Karzai escaped an assassination attempt - only hours after a car bomb killed at least 15 people in Kabul. Bridges have been destroyed, mines pepper the landscape and it is estimated rebuilding the roads alone will cost US$1 billion ($2.15 billion). Kabul University - once a prestigious institution - lacks power and water, let alone modern technology.
Afghanistan - about 2 1/2 times the size of New Zealand and with a population of 27 million - is a collection of crises as much as a country.
Lawlessness is inevitable when the dominating code is simple survival. As recently as last week came reports of an upsurge in banditry in the countryside, often by demobilised, homeless soldiers who have no income. Aid workers have been caught in the crossfire.
Problems are rife in cities, too. In January, 15 men started door-to-door looting in the Kandahar suburb of Manan Medical. They were the local police.
Last month armed men broke into the UN refugee agency in Ghazni. Earlier a grenade was thrown into the office of the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation in Kandahar, and the UN pulled all its foreign staff out of the town of Gardez because of security threats. Random explosions haven't been uncommon in Kabul this past month.
Afghanistan is volatile and there's real fear the deteriorating situation will see unemployed professional warriors in the provinces finding their way into global terrorism.
"If Afghanistan isn't rebuilt then we'll be back to square one," said Dominic Nutt, of the British-based Christian Aid organisation, after being held up by bandits a fortnight ago.
"The war on terrorism has to be a war on poverty, too."
If poverty and alienation make for guerrillas and terrorists, Afghanistan is fertile ground: last week the UN revealed six million Afghans were at risk of hunger and the return of 1.5 million refugees has meant much of last year's aid has been used to simply cope with their needs.
The impending winter means matters will only get worse. A hungry man is an angry man, and in Afghanistan many of the men have guns. Unless they are in the Army.
"Believe it or not, we have difficulty getting weapons here," Lieutenant Colonel Kevin McDonnel, commander of the American special forces battalion that trains Afghan soldiers, told Time a fortnight ago.
Minister of Defence Mohammed Qasim Fahim isn't especially helpful. As a warlord commanding a private militia of 18,000, he's not overly keen to help to build a rival army.
To be effective, or even just survive, President Karzai needs a military force the equal of any warlord, but the US will have trained only 13,000 soldiers by the end of next year - if that. Many recruits get bored or disillusioned (especially with the poor pay) and so wander back home or join a warlord's army.
Despite that, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is oozing confidence. "It's a very good thing that's happened in Afghanistan," he said last month when hailing the return to what he called democracy. "And all this Henny-Penny 'The sky is falling!' and 'Isn't it terrible?' is nonsense."
Realistically, however, the fragile interim Government is on a knife-edge. Karzai travels with American bodyguards rather than trust his fate to soldiers loyal to Defence Minister Fahim. Two of the delegates to the Loya Jirga - a traditional assembly of tribal representatives which met in June - are still in hiding after death threats.
The Loya Jirga was expected to appoint a broad-based government to rule until 2004, but instead consolidated a cabal of ruthless, self-interested warlords who have filled the power vacuum left by the flight of the Taleban.
Lower down the totem pole, things are equally shaky. The taxes many governors collect don't always get back to central Government.
The economy, such as it is, barely exists and what there is lacks management because experts have fled or been killed.
The first task confronting new Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani is to get a banking system running. After that he'll worry about ensuring Government workers get paid on time, and think about controlling the currency in a country where warlords print their own money.
Ghani is working with Anwar Ahady, governor of Afghanistan's central bank.
Ahady, who left in 1978 and taught political science in Rhode Island after working as a banker in Chicago, must wonder what he has come back to. The Civil Aviation Minister was murdered on the day of his return, in July the vice-president was gunned down, and he travels with security guards carrying AK-47s.
The foreign exchange department in his bank doesn't have a phone and the fax line is in his office, so he spends hours sorting through piles of paper.
Ghani - who has stomach cancer and a reputation for being abrupt and impatient, - has a formidable task-list: to formulate a central tax-collecting system; to distribute foreign aid in a country full of graft; to train staff in a nation where literacy levels are low; and to instil a sense of public service in a slothful, corrupt bureaucracy. He also has to get a banking system functioning while trying to collect revenue from warlords who refuse to turn over customs duties they impose in the regions they control.
One part of the traditional economy is booming, however. It was suggested that under the Taleban, opium poppy cultivation had been eradicated, although that might have been propaganda aimed at winning international favour.
Whatever happened then, it's clear what's happening now. The Government banned poppy production in January, but farmers have planted again and the UN estimates crops worth more than US$1 billion are being produced, almost the level of the late 1990s when Afghanistan supplied 70 per cent of the world's heroin.
If Afghanistan is more a concept than a country, it is one the US cannot walk away from lest it repeats the errors of the past. But some are also saying it cannot stay there much longer.
When the Soviets invaded, the US stepped back, supported the factions that fought them, and watched with glee as they became bogged down for a decade. It was the Soviet Union's Vietnam, everyone said. Now the Americans are running into the same problems.
A fortnight ago Colonel James Huggins, commander of the 3rd Brigade Task Force of the 82nd Airborne Division, reported back after an eight-day sweep through the mountains looking for Taleban and al Qaeda fugitives. It was the biggest such operation in five months and largely unsuccessful.
"It was clear to me there was advance warning at each of the sites we went to," said Huggins.
US forces often co-ordinate with local warlords and Government units who are familiar with the region. A whisper here, an exchange of information for cash money ... loyalty is flexible in Afghanistan.
"We didn't go in there to leave in a way that allows it to turn back into a terrorist training camp," Rumsfeld said last month. "We went in there so that would not happen. And the end-state is when the Afghan Government has the capability to provide for its own security."
That might take a while. At the same press conference the US commander for Afghanistan, General Tommy Franks, acknowledged that troops would remain in Afghanistan for a long, long time. Years, in fact.
The real fear is, as journalist Robert Fisk outlined last month, that a backlash against the American presence is almost inevitable and is already palpable in parts of the country.
When the Americans accidentally bombed a wedding party at Uruzgan in late June it was more than a public relations disaster. It started a whirlwind of local rumour. Reports circulated that Americans had taken photographs of the naked bodies of dead Afghan women. A rational explanation is possible - photos may have been taken to assist the subsequent investigation, and bombs tend to blast clothes off their victims - but that is how anti-American sentiment started in villages in southern Vietnam. Gossip grows, rumours flourish, anger rises.
A Muslim cleric, Imam Mohamed Sayed, said Americans were like the Russians, and Afghans should wage a holy war against them. Few took him seriously, but it would take only another wedding party or two and the cry might become a roar.
If the Americans invade Iraq then interest in Afghanistan will move out of the frame. Again. The Americans might get out, leaving unfinished business - and that doesn't mean al Qaeda or Taleban sympathisers. It means a country without an infrastructure or hope.
But as Interior Minister Taj Mohammed Wardak said, "This is a country that was assaulted ... by criminals and crazy people. It takes a little time."
And there is good news. Unicef says 486 female teachers are working in the five south-western provinces with 16,674 girls at school, polio is almost eradicated in those provinces, and 16 million people have benefited from international aid in the past year.
Schools have been rebuilt and more than three million children have returned to classes.
Northern Afghanistan's largest city, Mazar-i-Sharif, has just been reconnected to neighbouring Uzbekistan's electricity grid after being disconnected four years ago when the Taleban didn't pay its bills.
Crime has fallen 70 per cent in Kabul, say peacekeepers, and the curfew that once started at 10pm and ran until 4am has been narrowed from midnight to 3.30am.
Jean-Claude Van Damme videos are popular in Kabul and can be rented for about 10c a night.
So things are improving. The press is more free than it was, Radio Afghanistan went back on air in November (and broadcast music for the first time in five years), and there is local television again. With game shows.
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Afghans' wheel of misfortune
By GRAHAM REID
When you think of Afghanistan you don't think of a television game show - you probably don't think of television at all.
Guns and ammunition belts, tribal warlords and American troops, towering mountains where Osama Bin Laden might, or might not, still be hiding. This is the Afghanistan of
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