International aid money flows into the capital, but most of it never makes it out. Fought over by warlords, taxed, delayed, squandered and mismanaged, funneled into the long winding guts of bureaucracies, only a fraction of it ends up where it is intended to. In Kabul, aid agency employees drive sparkling Land Rovers and defense ministry officials cruise in new Toyotas with tinted windows. Back in Kunar province, I'd spoken to three tribal soldiers at the Nawa pass border crossing who said they hadn't been paid in more than six months. When I asked them why they stayed at their posts, one simply told me that it was his duty to guard the border and that love of his country kept him there.

Later, on the way back from driving south toward Jalalabad, I saw a man lying in the dust in the road, thin as a rail, with an IV coming out of his arm. There were no hospitals, no clinics available, no one with proper medical training, and so the man was left on his own. Hundreds of scenes like this demonstrate that the aid package hasn't made it far out of Kabul. If the aid agencies are asked about it, they will give a predictable but reasonable reply: The provinces aren't secure, they are too dangerous. I did see the UNHCR handing out bags of wheat to returning refugees, but there are no Westerners around unless you count U.S. soldiers: no Red Cross, no Medecins Sans Frontieres.

The fact is that less than a year after the celebrated demise of the Taliban, Afghanistan is experiencing a low-grade war, a bubbling pot of violence and anarchy that only the U.S. military presence is keeping from boiling over. The moment the international presence scales down in the capital, the very second that U.S. military attention drifts away and westward toward Iraq, ambitious men within the new Afghan government will kick off a bloody snatch-and-grab operation, leaving a large number of civilians dead, and they will take anything that is not bolted down and then shell the rest, a replay of the mid-'90s when Kabul was laid to waste. It will be the same people doing it, another tragic irony. No one can predict the future, but this is how it feels in Kabul, and everyone I asked, whether journalist or Afghan national, agreed that this was what was coming. Conflicts are breaking out all over the country, but Afghanistan isn't a story any more, so most of these battles and the reasons they are being fought are going unreported. And as Iraq looms, Afghanistan will shrink even more. When I left Kabul, the big agencies were already scaling back their news bureaus, the great unblinking eye of the media making plans to look at something else.

On Sept. 26, only 60 miles from the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, fierce fighting broke out between the forces of two warlords who are both nominally part of the Karzai government. A recent Reuters article described the breakdown between the men as a disagreement over the demilitarization of the city: Because it was a wire story, the writer could not take note of the irony. Just 100 miles south of Kabul, on Sept. 27, a renegade warlord named Padshah Khan Zadran threatened to reoccupy the city of Khost, a town his forces controlled for several months before the legitimate governor succeeded in running him out of town on Sept. 9.

As renewed fighting has plagued Khost and Mazar, other parts of Afghanistan are ready to follow suit, making the Karzai administration appear weaker with each passing day. The writ of the U.S.-backed government, as most people here readily admit, does not extend beyond the outskirts of Kabul, and without U.S. military intervention it cannot coerce the warlords to lay down their arms. Up until now, peace has been the norm because the warlord-governors of each province have been waiting to see how they will fare in the government, but there are signs that they are growing disappointed with their take. In the past, Karzai has relied on negotiation rather than force to maintain security, but in the case of Padsha Khan Zadran, this strategy has begun to fail.

The day after Zadra issued his threat, Saturday the 28th, at exactly 9 p.m., I was working at my desk in the Mustafa when the second Kabul bomb went off. The hotel shook and the pressure wave rolled over us and pushed the windows in and then pushed them out again as it passed. Nothing broke, but the sound was spectacular. It wasn't anything like the sound of an air strike. This was deeper, more like a tympanum drum in the orchestra, a rolling big finish in a symphony. Up on the roof of the hotel, people were eating dinner when it detonated and somebody I didn't know pointed in the direction of the blast and, laughing for the benefit of his friends at dinner, said to me, "Make sure you tell me all about it when you get back," and then took an enormous bite of lamb kebab and a hit of smuggled Heineken. The sound came from the direction of Wazir Akhbar Khan. Until we arrived at the scene, I was sure that the target of the bomb was the American Embassy, but it wasn't.

Outside the Mustafa, photographer Steve Connors and I waited for Paula Bronstein, a photographer for Getty, to drive up. Ten minutes after the explosion, we climbed into her car and followed the police vehicles with flashing blue lights down the main streets, giving directions to the driver but not knowing precisely where the thing had gone off. As we followed the police cars, hurtling through intersections, we started to see Afghan soldiers running down the street with their weapons up, shouting at other journalists. We ignored them and instead looked for the armored vehicles of the international forces because they would certainly be on their way to secure the scene, and we didn't have to say that we were less worried about Italians or Turks than the Fahim's soldiers, because the foreign soldiers can control themselves most of the time and the Afghans can't. Paula's car rattled and swayed down the dark streets at 50 miles an hour and we looked out the windows at everything and nothing. Finding the site of the blast was like swimming up a river in the dark, through sirens and all the chaos and disorder, and as we got closer to the site, we saw Afghans had come out of their stores and houses and were just waiting to see what would happen next. They were listening for a second, more powerful bomb, because in the textbook practice of terror, there's often a small device that draws people to the scene, and it's the second one that finishes them off.

We found the ISAF armored personnel carriers parked in front of an apartment building called Microrayon Two, along with a hundred soldiers, some of them Italians. No one knew what was going on. One Italian soldier mumbled into his radio, "Everything's calm here," but in fact it was grade A mayhem, broken glass falling from the shattered windows of the apartment block and dazed residents moving in every possible direction. We followed the soldiers around back to the lot behind the building, through cordons of confused Afghan police who just let us through, while Paula and Steve were running and getting their camera gear together as they got close to the scene of the crime.

The bombers put the device behind the apartment building, in an empty lot a hundred feet from the tower block, blowing in all of its windows, sending glass flying toward families who had just finished their evening meal. Remarkably, no one had been killed. Glass kept falling down, and slowly, the residents were getting it together, taking an inventory of the wounded, getting them to the hospital in ambulances and cabs. The wire services reported that only five had been wounded, but it was more than that, and when I saw the blood it didn't seem trivial or so easy to write off as a non-event, an attack which somehow didn't live up to the bloody bombing on Sept. 5. Inside the apartment complex, one young girl stood in her house and told me in a calm voice how worried she was, and showed me the gash on her hand from the flying glass.

We wanted to see the crater, and by this time there were more Afghan soldiers who formed a line to keep us out because they finally had received instructions from somewhere, and when Paula tried to get through to get a picture of the crater (it was 12 feet wide), one of the soldiers grabbed her breast and she immediately took a swing at him and connected with his face, and the line of them surged and buckled, the whole crowd of stickmen with their automatic rifles.

At 9:30, we were still trying to understand where we were in the city, and the 15-year-old son of a police captain, who spoke a little English, told me that the complex just across the ruined lot was the offices of Military Intelligence and the bomb had been placed under a wall that separated the Military Intelligence building from the apartments. The mud-brick wall took most of the blast on one side, and left the government building untouched, reflecting the explosion's energy outward to the apartment complex. The bomb had certainly been a message, carefully arranged so that it wouldn't kill anyone, just cause panic and destruction, but the message isn't known; there's only the fact that it happened.

After the attack, Reuters and other news agencies didn't give the bombing much space, a column inch or two, but the Microrayon Two blast certainly points to violent breakdowns within the Afghan government and not infiltrating al-Qaida or Taliban forces. (It's almost certainly not al-Qaida: the terror organization never does anything that small, and the fact that no U.S. target was involved also makes their involvement less likely. It's slightly more plausible that it was the work of the Taliban, but the same strictures apply. Moreover, the fact that the bombing appears to have been a message fits better with the internal-faction theory.) The most plausible theory, perhaps, is that the bombing was a message aimed at Mohammed Fahim, the minister of defense, or at members of his intelligence agency, whose building was a mere 10 yards from the explosion.

At the Wazir Akhbar Khan hospital, Zaina Naeeb, injured by flying glass and still bleeding from the gash that covered her head, waited for a cab to take her home, but she didn't make a sound, and when I think about it now, none of the wounded cried or shouted or panicked. And Zaina, Mohammed Naeeb's wife, who would have been killed if the glass had flown a centimeter in a different direction, waited quietly with her husband as he held her IV, then waited quietly while Paula took photographs of her, but she couldn't stop shaking.

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