KABUL: It was quiet last week in the eastern Afghan town of Gardez, a local aid worker told his headquarters. “Just five rockets landed in the area last night, nothing unusual.”

Listen to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visiting Kabul last week and the war in Afghanistan is all but over. Listen to the United Nations this week and insecurity is in danger of spiralling out of control.

On the ground in Afghanistan, aid workers and diplomats say US rhetoric and the Afghan reality are dangerously out of sync.

Violence is mounting, warlords are more powerful than ever, and international attention is waning. Unless things change soon, they say, there is a risk elections set for the middle of next year will be a farce, and could usher in a new era of violence.

“This process is going nowhere,” said a senior diplomat in Kabul. “We need a wake-up call in the next couple of months. A wake-up call at the end of the year will be too late.”

UN Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi complained on Tuesday about almost daily attacks by remnants of the Taliban on aid workers and Afghans, as well as deadly factional fighting.

“The issue of security casts a long shadow over the whole peace process and, indeed, over the whole future of Afghanistan,” he told the Security Council, appealing again for international peacekeepers to be deployed outside the capital Kabul.

Brahimi’s warning came in stark contrast to some breezily confident remarks by Rumsfeld, who said last week that most of the country was secure, and the era of major combat was over.

Alarm bells rang in Kabul. Was this a cover for gradual American disengagement?

“He is either joking or he is badly informed,” said Rafael Robillard of aid coordinating body ACBAR.

“The reality is that the war is not finished, reconstruction has hardly started, there are not enough resources for a country of this size, and they are fighting more than ever.”

ETHNIC RIVALRIES: One of the core problems facing Afghanistan is the increasing alienation of the country’s Pakhtoon majority since the ouster of the mainly Pakhtoon Taliban regime in a US-led war in late 2001.

The other side of the coin is the control exerted by a mainly Tajik clique in the government led by powerful Vice President and Defence Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim, diplomats say.

Diplomats and analysts say Fahim’s stranglehold over the defence ministry and intelligence agencies has to be loosened if the peace process is to advance.

Other factions and commanders are unlikely to take part in a UN-organized disarmament process this year unless power is shared more evenly at the centre.

The Afghan national army, being put together at a painfully slow pace, is unlikely to be accepted around the country unless its command structures are more ethnically balanced.

“If security sector reform does not happen, all the other processes here are bound to fail,” said Vikram Parekh of the International Crisis Group in Kabul.

Diplomats say the disarmament process is also being stymied by the activities of the US-led coalition forces, who are still paying large sums of money to warlords and regional commanders for cooperation in the hunt for Taliban and Al Qaeda fugitives.

TALIBAN STEP INTO VACUUM: It is not all gloom and doom. Although foreign aid has been slow to arrive, hundreds of millions of dollars are promised this year to rebuild roads and help rural communities.

“I don’t see things going down the tubes,” said one UN official with years of experience in Africa’s worst troublespots. “There are some positive things going to happen now, which will give a sense of development.”

But in the Pakhtoon heartlands, that sense of development is hardly evident. Some people’s only contact with the international community comes when American soldiers kick down doors in a seemingly indiscriminate search for weapons.

Two aid workers have been murdered in the past six weeks. It is a brutal tactic but one already having an impact. Security concerns are hampering aid delivery, and that in turn will only amplify the sense of alienation among the Pakhtoons.—Reuters