Growing U.S. doubts over Afghan leader
By Davd Rohde and James Risen The New York Times
A recent Central Intelligence Agency assessment found that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has been significantly weakened by rising popular frustration with his U.S.-backed government, American officials say.

The assessment found that Karzai's government and security forces continued to struggle to exert authority beyond Kabul, said a senior U.S. official who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. The assessment also found that increasing numbers of Afghans viewed Karzai's government as corrupt, failing to deliver promised reconstruction and too weak to protect the country from rising Taliban attacks.

The assessment, which was conducted before Karzai's visit to Washington in late September, echoes the frustration that has gathered force in Afghanistan since the spring, and U.S. officials in Washington and Kabul are expressing increasingly dire warnings regarding the situation here. Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, said in a recent interview that the United States faced "stark choices" in Afghanistan. Averting failure, he said, would take "multiple years" and "multiple billions."

"We're going to have to stay at it," Neumann said. "Or we're going to fail, and the country will fall apart again."

Officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's main development arm, said they were rushing $14 million in assistance to southern Afghanistan, where a recent NATO offensive routed the Taliban, but where suicide bombings continue to damage public confidence.

"We've spent about $800,000 on displaced people," said Leon Waskin, the agency's mission director in Afghanistan. "We're planning to start a program to repair agricultural infrastructure and damaged houses."

In addition to the CIA assessment, the National Security Council began a classified, interagency review of U.S. training and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan this summer after violence reached a new high. While that review is not finished, officials said it is expected to include a request for additional financing.

Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the interagency review covered anti- Taliban and counternarcotics activities as well as efforts to counter extremism and to integrate the central government with local and provincial governments.

"We are proud of the progress that has been made in the last five years, but know there is more to do," he said. "The United States is committed to the people of Afghanistan for the long term."

Neumann, ambassador here for just over a year, laid out a full menu of tasks that he said the U.S.-led effort needed to accomplish in Afghanistan, including reviving the economy, building roads and power plants, and improving security. He said plans drafted in 2002 to train the country's army and police force needed to be revamped and expanded.

Neumann, whose father served as the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 1966 to 1973, said the country's security forces had to be better supplied. "We have a war, not in all parts of the country, but we have a war," he said. "So we have to build a much better equipped army and a much better equipped police."

Training the police represents an even larger challenge than strengthening the army, Neumann said. "The police needs a whole huge, major effort," he said. "That wasn't what the program was designed to do when we were at peace."

The senior U.S. official said Afghans widely viewed the force as corrupt and failing to provide security.

A sharp increase in suicide attacks and roadside bombings over the past two years has persuaded many Afghans that security has sharply deteriorated under Karzai. The tactics appear to have migrated from Iraq, according to the official, probably via the Internet and people traveling between the countries.

"There's not been a tradition of the suicide bombers," the official said. "Psychologically, this has had a major impact."

One reason the central government has trouble exerting control beyond Kabul, the official said, is that it has little means of connecting to the country's strong village councils.

At the same time, provincial and district governments remain weak or dominated by corrupt local officials.

"There's no transmission belt that goes between Kabul and the local government," said the official. "You lost a whole generation of education and bureaucrats and people that can take a government plan and make it real on a local level."

A representative government and stronger army, said Neumann, the ambassador, are the only means to prevent the country from disintegrating as it did during the 1990s. "Ultimately you're going to succeed with a policy of building an army in a country with a participatory government," he said. "Or the country is going to fragment again."

David Rohde reported from Afghanistan, and James Risen from Washington.