THAT SAID, the United States and the United Nations each have strong interests in the region and in seeing the Afghanistan experiment succeed. The US, obviously, has strong military and political interests in Afghanistan. Militarily, Afghanistan provides a convenient venue for launching an air campaign against Iraq if Saudi Arabia and Turkey become problematic. Though it has muted its criticism recently, Saudi Arabia has made a point of stating that it will not allow American airfields in the monarchy to serve as a base for attacks against another Arab country. Turkey, the current source of peacekeepers in Afghanistan, is more politically fragile now than ever, given the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the isolation of Turkish prime minister BŸlent Ecevit’s coalition. While the current Ecevit government would do anything for membership in the EU, it might fall soon, opening the way to a host of conservative Islamic parties who would be more interested in aligning Turkey with an Islamic Middle East rather than a secular Europe.

As one highly placed military official in Afghanistan puts it: "One day, either Turkey is going to wake up and realize that it gets more by constantly needing to be bought, or, and this is more likely, Europeans are going to realize that no matter its strategic importance as a gateway to Europe — Turkey is not European. Either way, despite a small police action in Kabul, we can’t count on Turkey for military support against other Muslims."

Meanwhile, the United Nations, once a forum for debate during the Cold War, a place where Khrushchev could bang his shoe and get a hearing, is still trying to justify its existence in a world where American strong-arm diplomacy can forge coalitions — making a UN imprimatur irrelevant. A victory of peace and development in Afghanistan could go a long way toward shoring up the UN’s reputation and better positioning it as an actor in the international political issues that are sure to shape the century.

It’s a bit dumbfounding that neither the US nor the UN has adopted policies that would further its aims in the long run. Seemingly in sync with their failures, these two bumbling players in Afghan politics repeat two key phrases that have damned prospects for peace and reconstruction in Afghanistan: "we are not involved in nation-building" and "we must tread with a light foot."

The first comment, uttered after the fall of Kabul by George W. Bush and later picked up by Tony Blair — perhaps provides the most insightful entrŽe into America’s self-deception. The proclamation has forced the Bush presidency, like the American Catholic Church, to say one thing while covering up the fact that it’s doing another with an alacrity that would make Cardinal Law proud.

As Jonathan Chait recounted in "The Peculiar Duplicity of Ari Fleischer" for The New Republic in June, during a White House briefing some months ago a journalist asked Mr. Fleischer if the Bush administration’s plan to create sustaining structures to support the education, health care, and welfare of the Afghan people meant that Mr. Bush had finally warmed to nation-building as good policy. In response, Fleischer stated that Mr. Bush had never criticized nation-building and has always been for such things as health, education, and welfare, even though in the second presidential debate candidate Bush hammered then vice-president Gore with, "I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building." The journalist was so shocked, he sat down.

In fact, America isn’t involved in rebuilding Afghanistan. And the few American officials who are nipping around the edges of Afghanistan’s problems by helping reconstruct a school here or an orphanage there aren’t even really all that interested in letting reporters, let alone Afghans, know what they’re up too. The Joint Civil Military Operations Task Force (JCMOTF), cipher for American nation-building efforts, has a media office at the Mustafa Hotel in Kabul. Often the office is empty and locked — sometimes for weeks at a time. In fact, the office only started to open on a semi-regular basis when the restaurant at the Mustafa added pizza and lasagna to the menu. Perhaps the reason why they hide from view is that they’re embarrassed — building a school in Kabul and an orphanage in Herat is not nation-building, it’s teasing.

As for the second comment — "we must tread with a light foot" — it’s frequently uttered by Lakhdar Brahimi, the special representative of the secretary general of the United Nations, when talking about the UN mission in Afghanistan. Apart from helping to lend credibility to the first puppet government, the Afghan Interim Authority, the "light foot" doctrine damned the democratic process in Afghanistan even before it got off the ground during the June elections of the Loya Jirga, and all but ensured that the Afghan Transitional Government, like it’s predecessor, would end in failure.

International observers who returned to Kabul after the local elections in May and June called the elections "rigged" and "corrupt." They derided the UN’s decision to pull out the logistical support that would have allowed for effective monitoring. Not only were there widespread allegations among international monitors that Northern Alliance factions within Hamid Karzai’s Interim Authority intimidated villagers and rigged elections, but despite having one monitor stoned and another threatened with rape — the UN enforced a gag order on the monitors.

"We were not there to monitor elections, we were there to be there and by our presence to give the impression that the election was fair," said Dr. Cornelius Reitveld, a Dutch observer who has been working in Afghanistan since 1987.

Dr. Micheal Pohly, director of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a non-governmental organization (NGO) for the promotion of democracy aligned with Germany’s Social Democratic Party, says the United Nations "knows quite well that it has a problem. You have to cancel between 50 and 60 percent of all the elections — they are faked — and this is the lower limit; some Afghans say you have to cancel all of the elections. You have had no chance in the northern parts, no chance, you have had no chance in Herat, no chance in the region directly in Kandahar, Logar, Konar."

In fact, the UN had already started to distance itself from the elections before they even began. The observers, who were subcontracted through the Asia Foundation, an NGO based in San Francisco that works in the Asian Pacific region, were initially to be credentialed UN election observers. On arrival in Afghanistan, though, those chosen by the Asia Foundation were told that they would be, "international monitors."

The monitors were given a series of identification cards that seemed to serve no purpose other than to distance the work of the monitors from the UN. According to one UN observer who declined to be named, "Initially some of us had the UN flag [on the card], then it went. Some of us had the UN oversticker, then that went.... Even with the ID cards, there was an attempt to put a little distance between the observer mission and UNAMA."

When asked about the fairness of the elections, the director of secretariat for the Special Commission for the Convening of the Emergency Loya Jirga, Dr. A. Aziz Ahmad — a native of Kabul who lived in America for 18 years — simply shrugged and said, "We are only here to process complaints about election irregularities, the 21-member Loya Jirga Commission makes the decisions. We also send a copy to the United Nations. There is no money to investigate all of the charges of corruption."

In the meantime, in Mazar-i-Sharif warlords were allowed to intimidate both the electors and UN staffers. "One of the rules was no arms," says Reitveld. "Everybody was searched. In walks [General Rashid] Dostum with six armed, huge, Turkish bodyguards ... everybody [from the UN] was there." Dostum’s contingent, "walked in the Anhoy tent, the Sheberghan tent, and the whole Dostum leadership was in. Basically the signal that it sent was that commanders like Dostum were above the law."

The bottom line? "This thing is like a soufflŽ, it’s nothing, it doesn’t really matter what is going on — it’s theater," says Reitveld of the current Afghan government. "The Loya Jirga is about what is going on in Kabul — Kabul-ki Theater. It’s all about self-deception."

Assassination. Self-deception. These are the precepts of the new government in Afghanistan.

Andrew Bushell reports from Central Asia for a number of publications, including the Economist. You can read his previous Phoenix stories on Pakistan's slave trade and Daniel Pearl's killers.