Reining in the Warlords.(Afghanistan)

Afghan warlord Ismail Khan, the governor of Herat province, tries his best to sound like a loyal subordinate. When asked if he submits to President Hamid Karzai's authority, Khan laughs and points to a portrait of the president hanging on the wall behind his desk. "If I didn't respect him and his authority I wouldn't have his picture hanging up there." But posters plastered on shop windows around Herat City come closer to the truth: they feature a large, imposing portrait of Khan with a smaller image of Karzai tucked away in the background.

Indeed, Khan, the self-styled "Emir of the Southwest," pays little more than lip service to Karzai and Kabul. With a military--force some 25,000 strong, Khan keeps a tight grip on the trade routes from Iran and Turkmenistan. Last year his control of this border trade netted him an estimated $100 million to $300 million in customs revenue alone. With that kind of money, Afghanistan's warlords need not answer to anyone, least of all Karzai. They run their expansive provinces as personal fiefdoms. And, like the caliphs of old, it is their word--not Karzai's--that is the law in their lands.

As the United States contemplates rebuilding Iraq as a multiethnic, democratic state--with minimal troops and a footprint that lasts less than a year--it would do well to consider what similar haste has wrought in Afghanistan. There, too, the Americans identified local leaders and put power in their hands. The problem is that they've kept it. More than a year into the job, Karzai still cannot enforce his paper mandate outside Kabul. Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim--a warlord in his own right--controls Afghanistan's Army, which largely consists of his own Northern Alliance militiamen. Only the most paltry sums are making their way to the coffers of the national treasury. And now strongmen like Fahim and Khan, who were U.S. allies in the successful war to topple the Taliban, are beginning to suggest that the United States is overstaying its welcome in Afghanistan.

Worse still, the warlords and hard-line Islamists seem to be making common cause, which may explain why Taliban remnants are staging a slow but steady comeback in the countryside. Both camps want to limit American influence in Afghanistan as well as Western-style freedoms and democracy. Socially at least, progress has stalled, and some observers fear reforms are more unlikely than ever. "I see 2002 as a wasted year," says Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid. "Now that the warlords are strong and the Taliban is coming back, it may be too late to start focusing on nation-building."

For his part, Karzai is still occupied with establishing the rudiments of government, a task made nearly impossible by a lack of revenues and military muscle to project central-government control beyond Kabul. Early on, the most powerful warlords--notably Khan in the west, Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Mohammed in the north and Gul Agha Sherazai in the southeast--verbally agreed to hand over their staggering provincial windfalls to Kabul. But the central government is still waiting on the warlords to follow through. "They never say no to us," complains Karzai's chief spokesman Said Fazel Akbar. "They always say yes, then don't deliver. Right now the provinces simply are too independent." Kabul has so far received only a pittance, some $7 million from Khan. Kandahar's warlord Sherazai has "never given us a penny," gripes a Kabul government official.

Nor have the warlords been any more generous when it comes to giving up their weapons. "The wealth of these guys is tied to their guns," says Abdul Malik, 40, a notorious former northern warlord who is now a businessman and aspiring politician in Kabul. "Without guns they can't extort money, collect taxes or customs ...