A Tale of Two Wars: Afghanistan

Saboor isn't taking any chances. The bus conductor, 30, prepares for his twice-weekly Kabul-to-Kandahar trips by exchanging his city outfit for the filthy tunic and voluminous trousers of a poor mechanic, the better to fool potential robbers. He rubs grease and dirt on his face to conceal from possible Taliban attackers that he is clean-shaven. These precautions, Saboor says, have saved his life. Just the other day, a gang of thieves robbed his passengers at gunpoint. Two weeks ago, Taliban insurgents pulled some 50 passengers off a bus and slaughtered 27 men they falsely claimed were Afghan soldiers.

Seven years after the war to topple the Taliban regime, Afghans are starting to wonder if anything has been achieved. The highway between Kabul and Kandahar was supposed to be a success story. Completed in 2003, it has instead become a symbol of all that plagues Afghanistan: insecurity, corruption and the radical Islamic insurgency that feeds off both. If Afghanistan is ever to fulfill the promise that beckoned when the U.S. first went to war there, those trends will have to be reversed.

That won't be easy. Monthly casualty figures for U.S. service members in Afghanistan now rival those in Iraq--though there are about a quarter the number of troops there. Insurgent groups have spread to previously peaceful regions. "We are not exactly in a stalemate, but we are still marching uphill," says a NATO military commander in Kabul. He compares Afghanistan today with "about where we were in Iraq in 2004 to 2005"--which is just before it started to get really bad.

The U.S. intelligence community seems to share that assessment. While still a "work in progress," the National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, due out after the U.S. elections, portrays a country on a "downward spiral," says a Pentagon official who was briefed about the report. The key reasons: a revitalized Taliban, inadequate U.S. and NATO forces, the funds generated for the Taliban by narcotics, and a government so consumed by corruption and inefficiency that it cannot offer a reasonable alternative to the insurgents.

There has been progress, of course. More Afghan children are in school today than at any other time in the nation's history, and the private sector is growing. But such good news is easily undermined by the increasing insecurity and Afghanistan's rampant corruption. Ashraf Ghani, a former Finance Minister, says his nation has reached a fork in the road. "It is not inevitable that we go to that downward spiral," he says. "If we take the right road, we can get to the destination of a stable and eventually prosperous Afghanistan."