Afghanistan has a heck of a long way to go, but one thing it can be thankful for--it certainly is no Iraq

Kabul - It is voting day, and a white-haired man with missing teeth and a confused grin emerges from the cardboard booth. Esmatullah Lalzada spent almost 10 minutes perusing the seven-page ballot, which contained the names and photos of the 390 parliamentary candidates from Kabul province. "I didn't know any of them," says the 65-year-old sheepishly. "But people told me, 'For the sake of God, put a check somewhere!' so I chose one man and one woman. I don't know their names, but I liked their pictures." When asked why he even bothered coming out to vote if he didn't have a candidate to support, he says earnestly, and with a hint of surprise at the question, "This is our country! I came to choose somebody."

The illiterate former electrician reflects the sentiment of many Afghans--who take pride more in the exercise of democracy than in its result. Theoretically, the parliamentary elections spelled the end of a three-year process to bring democracy to Afghanistan. But in truth, the job is only just beginning. There have been many signs of progress over the past four years since the fall of the Taliban. But among the people, there is a new disenchantment, a feeling that with the billions of aid dollars flowing into the country, more progress should have been made. And experts who study this troubled country say it will be at least a decade more before the Afghans can stand on their own.

Making big strides here is so difficult partly because the past saw such complete devastation. After 25 years of almost constant war, the country was a shambles, its base-line economic indicators desperately low. Seventy percent of the people--including 90 percent of women--can't read. The world's fifth-poorest country, Afghanistan derives about half its GDP from drug trafficking. "The country needs to find a way to make its living on the basis of something other than foreign aid and illegal narcotics," says a senior western diplomat. "It needs a mortgage system, a banking system, property law."

New money. Despite democratic advances, the central government in Kabul is weak, and large swaths of the country are still dominated by regional warlords and warring factions. "These conditions leave the nation at risk of once again becoming a threat to itself and others," says a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, an arm of Congress. President Hamid Karzai has attempted to build consensus by bringing both former warlords and the Taliban into the political fold--but violence around the country still increased over the past year; more American soldiers have been killed here in the past six months than in any other six-month stretch since the Taliban's rule collapsed. U.S. commanders hope to reduce the number of American troops next year and replace them with NATO forces from Europe. "Afghanistan has gone from being a failed state to a fragile one," says the diplomat. "To take it from fragile to sturdy will take a lot of work."

The mood in the capital is that of a gold-rush town. With U.N. workers, aid organizations, and journalists pouring in, prices are rising faster than incomes. Houses in Kabul that used to rent for hundreds of dollars a month now go for thousands. The first disco in Kabul, Cococabana, just opened. A sign on the door reads: "Gun-Free Zone." The owner is Alex Ebrat, a 26-year-old Afghan-American from Las Vegas (locals call him "Alex Vegas"). Inside, he shows off a smoke machine he imported from Dubai. New money is everywhere, it seems, and Afghans just want to grab their piece before it disappears.

Progress or inflation?

Shar-e-Now Park lies in the heart of Kabul. In a large canvas tent in the middle of the park, Bashar Dost has set up his headquarters. The former minister of planning has become one of the most popular figures in town, thanks to an antiforeign platform. "The Afghan people have lost trust in the international community," says the slight, bookish man. "It gave us $12 billion in three years, yes. But there is no change in ordinary people's lives."

Outside the tent, boys shoot baskets on a dusty court with a soccer ball. A woman in a burka sits on a bench waiting for her friends, who have come to meet Dost. Sharzia is 28, a teacher in a secondary school, and says that Dost gives voice to her feelings of frustration. She earns $50 a month, the same as she did two years ago--but the price of food in the market has multiplied. Sharzia and her husband have watched others cash in but haven't been able to do so themselves. One of the school headmasters got a job on the side with a nongovernmental organization. It pays $450 per month, so now he visits the school only occasionally--though he still holds his old job--and then leaves.

The Daqiqi Balkhi school, where Sharzia works, is housed in a crumbling, 200-year-old mosque. The walls are pockmarked with bullet holes, and the floor has fallen away in places. Eight hundred boys and girls attend this school, squeezing onto narrow metal benches for their classes, most of which are held in what look like refugee tents erected in the shady courtyard. In the most crowded tents, some sit cross-legged in the dirt. Rogul Shaffi, 58, has been a first-grade teacher in this school for 38 years. Judging her nation's progress, she says, has everything to do with what one's comparison point is. Before the civil war, Shaffi says, the school was in a regular building, and had plenty of books, blackboards, and teachers. But during the fighting in the 1980s, the school was destroyed, and they were forced to move all the students to another part of town. "Then, the books all taught violence. They had examples like, 'A mujahid fighter has a gun. Two bullets plus two bullets equals four bullets.' "

"What's going on?" Almost no one disputes the fact that much has been accomplished--on everything from women's rights to building up the army and police. "With the amount of money that came into Afghanistan and was spent on the right projects, I'm happy," President Karzai said recently. "But with the amount of money that was spent on NGO s that didn't have clear results for us, I am not happy."

The frustration is understandable. A common complaint is lack of electricity. Today, only 6 percent of Afghans have access. By 2009, thanks to $1 billion in foreign aid, 20 percent of Afghans are expected to have electrical power. After that, no one can say for sure.

Coordinating all the foreign aid projects has proven difficult--another source of Afghans' frustration. "There's a lack of a coherent approach from the international community," says a senior western adviser to the Karzai government. "There's overlapping structure after structure, and the ministers who speak the best English get the most money." Part of the problem is the division of authority among the donors that was laid out in the agreement signed by the various Afghan factions four years ago. The document laid out timetables and processes for developing a sovereign Afghanistan, but it was hardly a road map. Italy, for example, was supposed to take the lead in creating a new legal system but had only $6 million for the effort. Washington, by contrast, is spending $800 million for a new police force. Since the justice system affects so many other sectors of Afghan life, other donor countries have begun putting money into their own justice projects--without consulting with each other. The result, predictably enough, has been chaotic.

That same confusion exists between the Afghan government and the donors. Abdul Sitar Murad is the governor of Kapisa province. "Sometimes I see bridges being built, and I will stop and say, 'Who are you?' " he says. "They say, 'I am from USAID.' Sometimes it annoys me; sometimes I'm just astonished. I'm the governor, but I don't know what's going on."

Not surprisingly, many here believe much of the foreign aid money is being wasted. "The average cost of building a road in Afghanistan is half a million dollars per kilometer," says a senior diplomat in Kabul. "You start out with a certain amount, and by the time the contractor pays a consultant $1,000 a day to write a project report, pays for security and offices and cars, then subcontracts it out to an NGO, only about 20 percent goes into the project itself."

Noorullah Delawari has one of the nicest offices in Kabul. It has high ceilings, an enormous wooden desk, and framed notes from the currency that he introduced earlier this year. A former vice president of Lloyd's Bank in Los Angeles, Delawari, the governor of Afghanistan's Central Bank, says his country simply must reduce its dependence on foreign aid. The Central Bank had a corps of foreign advisers, but Delawari has begun a training program for his Afghan staff. He wants them to be self-sufficient within 18 months. "Progress is slower than expected," he says. "But I appreciate that the country has gone through a very difficult period. Education was practically shut off. We had a socialist-type bureaucracy, with layers of government. Now we're going back to unravel all these layers."

"This is a book."

That's the challenge, but some worry that the past four years have fostered a culture of dependency. "If the Ministry of Communication needs a helicopter, they will call General Eikenberry's office, not General Wardak's," says a senior U.S. adviser to the Afghan government, referring to the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, and the Afghan minister of defense, Gen. Abdul Raheem Wardak.

As for Delawari, his biggest challenge right now is keeping the currency stable. Exports are less than $500 million a year, he says, while imports total more than $3 billion. The country needs to increase its exports and find substitutes for the imports--which include such goods as water, dairy products, and cement. "It is obvious that right now our currency is being propped up by foreign aid and drug money," he says. "But one will end, and one we're fighting to end."

Attracting private investment will be key to this effort, which means strengthening not only security but also the rule of law. The Afghan justice system "remains unable to confront criminal networks or impunity, adjudicate land disputes, or protect citizens' rights," says a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But even so, there are people taking a plunge into the free enterprise system. Two of the fastest-growing companies in the country are the two mobile phone networks, which account for 10 percent of the government's revenue this year. Roshan, owned by the Aga Khan Foundation, already has over 600,000 subscribers. The ads for these mobile phone companies are on billboards all over town. A mujahideen fighter in the mountains, gun in one hand and mobile phone in the other. A businessman in a suit, in front of an airplane, talking on the phone. A man with a turban before a blue-tiled mosque, again with the ubiquitous cellphone. "But what will be the next growth center? What can Afghanistan export that the world needs? Call centers, textiles, concrete?" asks a senior western diplomat. "That is still a long way off."

One billboard looms above a square where men push carts made of tree branches tied together with strips of bicycle tire, piled high with cans of tomato paste, bulging sacks of grain, and piles of ripe grapes. Women in blue burkas shuffle through the dust alongside the cars, balancing their shopping sacks on their heads. A boy roasts corn on a wheelbarrow rigged as a mobile oven.

In one corner of the city, in the basement of a brand-new building, a 19-year-old in a pink scarf and platform shoes stands before her students. "This is a book," she says in English. "That is a fan. Now, who can give me an example of this and that?" A man with a gray beard raises his hand, smiling shyly. "This is a ruler?" he offers. "Very good, commander!" the young woman says. The class, a collection of burly men in traditional Afghan tunics, bursts into spontaneous applause.

School days. The students in this class are from different ethnicities, from all over the country. Many were bitter enemies who might have fought each other to the death just a few years ago. What they have in common is that they were all commanders, some of the 61,000 men in unregulated militias who willingly gave up their weapons under the official disarmament program over the past year. As part of the program, they are invited to take this monthlong course with classes in English, computers, human rights, and management. Nazar Momad, 42, commanded 200 fighters as a mujahideen colonel in Mazar-e Sharif. He began fighting when he was a teenager and never went to school. Now, after graduating from this program, he wants to become a businessman. "Yes, going to school is difficult," he says. "But we have suffered a lot in the past, so in comparison, sitting in class is not so bad."