THOSE WITH A tenuous grasp of geography may be excused for believing that " denial " is a river in Afghanistan — and not Egypt. Despite the best efforts of some in Congress, the White House has tried to present a picture of Afghanistan as a country on its way to recovery.

During a late-February visit to Washington, Afghan president Hamid Karzai met with President Bush at the White House. " Tremendous " was the word of the day. Bush noted the " tremendous progress " being made in Afghanistan. Karzai told Bush that " the United States and yourself have helped tremendously in the past year to rebuild Afghanistan, to help us in all aspects of life, including the three million children that now go to school who have been receiving help from the United States. "

An audience with the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee during the same visit went less " tremendously " for the Afghan president. Karzai faced outright skepticism from a bipartisan assemblage of senators, who poked and probed him about his country’s knotty security and human-rights problems in a public forum. The legislators also disputed the Afghan president’s predominantly upbeat presentation about reconstruction efforts to the committee. Democratic senators, such as Joseph Biden of Delaware and Barbara Boxer of California, offered pointed critiques of the Afghan reconstruction process. But it was Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska who raised the harshest voice, insisting that Karzai level with the committee. Hagel warned Karzai against giving " an impression that everything is going well and the problems and challenges are minimal but they are all manageable. " If Karzai didn’t fess up about the problems with the US Congress now, continued Hagel, " the next time you come back, then your credibility will be in question. "

Karzai was defensive, blaming bad press reports from Afghanistan for the impression that all wasn’t going swimmingly. He argued that " the government has much more authority in charge of the country than you can presume. " Of course, blaming bad press for the state of Afghanistan reconstruction seems almost absurd, particularly in the US. Since the routing of the Taliban in late 2001, the country has rarely been on the front pages of American newspapers — or on any pages at all. Dig a little deeper into foreign press accounts and non-governmental organization (NGO) reports, however, and the downbeat picture builds up story by story.

Chief among all the factors impeding Afghanistan’s reconstruction is basic security. The ambush killing of two members of US Special Forces on March 29 and the cold-blooded murder of Ricardo Munguia — a Red Cross worker from El Salvador — one day earlier are only the latest in a series of violent acts that have destabilized reconstruction efforts. (Munguia was pulled from his car and shot in the head in front of Afghan ICRC workers — whom the assailants warned not to work for foreign NGOs.)

On March 10, an International Security Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (ISAF) base near Kabul was attacked with rockets, killing a Dutch peacekeeper. On February 26, two Afghan commanders traded fire near a US base at Bagram. A US military spokesperson explained that they were " two sub-unit commanders who both operate north of the base and they are in a dispute over who owes who money and who should have access to the profits generated by some scrap metal. They are attempting to settle it with mortars. "

The latter incident sheds light on what’s at the root of the US’s unstable, inadequate approach to ousting the Taliban: the use of proxy forces — backed up with US expertise and air support — spared American lives but left the warlord power structure in place. As noted with a sort of celebratory glee in Bob Woodward’s account of the Afghan conflict, Bush at War (Simon & Schuster, 2002), CIA agents armed with suitcases of cash bought the support of warlords. And many military analysts pointed out that the proxy forces employed by the US military in the attack on Al Qaeda camps in Tora Bora in December 2001 may have allowed Osama bin Laden and other terrorists to elude capture or death in that battle. More important to the country’s long-term stability is the fact that the US approach has left the nation’s toxic brew of warlord rivalry largely in place outside Kabul. Even warlords within the government — such as General Mohammed Fahim — have refused to demobilize their private militias.

While some of Afghanistan’s warlords have stayed " on board, " others are giving the proverbial finger to the central government — or worse. Ismail Khan, a powerful warlord based in the western Afghan city of Herat, refuses to acknowledge the central government. Former Afghan prime minister and mujahideen fighter Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is also back on the scene, linking up with Taliban remnants to target international forces.

Another flaw in the American approach to Afghan security has been its bifurcation of international forces — and the lack of coordination between them. In order to wage the war on terrorism, the US military insisted on giving its 8000 troops in Afghanistan a free hand to attack remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. The peacekeeping ISAF forces in the country, which are concentrated in Kabul, number 5000 at the moment, hailing from 22 countries and supervised by a German/Dutch force. In late February, the Christian Science Monitor reported that tensions between the two forces were growing, with the result that US troops had been banned from parts of Kabul. One European diplomat based in Kabul told Monitor reporter Scott Baldauf that " there is a real danger of a shootout between ISAF and US forces because of a lack of coordination. "

In short, Afghanistan may be largely free of the Taliban’s iron-fisted repression, but that doesn’t mean the country is secure. Rather, Islamic fanaticism has made way for a more traditional patchwork of violent and competing regional fiefdoms. At best, international forces maintain uneasy oversight of the country; at worst, they are ready targets for Afghan warlords.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION may have forgotten to include money for reconstructing Afghanistan in its budget. But there is little doubt that the US experience in Afghanistan has informed the administration’s approach to fighting in Iraq — and to reconstructing it. Should the US shut out the United Nations and other groups and go it alone? Should all security and peacekeeping be left in the hands of the " coalition of the willing " — even if the policing and peace-enforcement duties involved in nation-building are not American strengths?

Some of the lessons are obvious. In the Iraq invasion, for example, the US has had little use for proxy fighters, limiting their use to Kurdish troops attacking Islamic fighters in Northern Iraq. The lack of civilian uprisings in Southern Iraq may have slowed the US-led coalition’s invasion plans, but it has also eliminated any need to reward possibly disreputable forces who " helped " oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Yet some of the lessons appear to be as slippery as the Bush administration’s promises to put the country back together. A headline on the front page of Monday’s Washington Post hinted at one source of future trouble: british forces enter basra as residents loot city. Add to that the lag in getting food, water, and medical supplies to Iraqi civilians as a result of the prolonged military actions in Southern Iraq, and the whiff of similarity to Afghanistan becomes overpowering.

But above all, the lesson from Afghanistan — at least for reconstruction purposes — is that security trumps all other issues. A report to the UN Security Council in February by various figures in charge of Afghan reconstruction clearly spells out the extent of the problem. A summary of the presentation notes that " Mutsuyoshi Nishimura, Ambassador of Japan in charge of Afghan Aid Coordination, warned that nation-building would not be able to succeed in Afghanistan so long as it remained a land of weapons where dangerous levels of tension existed between various armed groups. Furthermore, the resulting lack of security would prevent donors’ resources from reaching remote areas. While disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating soldiers was a good first step, it was not enough to provide lasting security. What was needed was for Afghanistan to create a new national army and police force, institute counter-narcotics measures, and establish an independent judiciary. " Indeed, as one reads through dozens of reports and press briefings on humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, security (or the decided lack of it) emerges again and again as the crucial factor in success or failure. In fact, UN briefings often include lengthy summaries of roads considered unsafe for travel by UN missions, civilian aid groups, and journalists.

On the most basic level, Afghanistan’s insecure environment has made it next to impossible to distribute aid. Kabul is by far the safest place in Afghanistan at the moment. It should be. It is home to the 5000 ISAF peacekeepers. Yet it is the peculiar irony of the security/aid conundrum that the country’s least-safe areas — former Taliban strongholds in the south and east of Afghanistan — are the very places where hearts and minds must still be won. Creating safe zones where international aid can reach people in those regions is crucial.

Two more casualties of Afghanistan’s lack of security have been democratization and human rights. As Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Marie Guéhenno told the Security Council in March, " The human-rights situation in Afghanistan continued to be undermined by the poor overall security environment. In the absence of effective state institutions, many Afghans were subjected to arbitrary rule by local commanders and had no recourse to legitimate judicial institutions. "

ATTACKS ON peacekeepers, constriction of aid, and denial of human rights have not served to put Afghanistan back in the world’s headlines just yet. Since little attention has been paid to America’s Afghan debacle, the Bush administration has been able to postpone — or even duck — its promise to rebuild the country it bombed in the first stage of its worldwide war on terrorism.

But it’s clear that the highly unpopular nature of the US-led war in Iraq will lead to intense scrutiny. It’s almost certain that any reconstruction of Iraq that follows the playbook used in Afghanistan will be a public-relations disaster for the US — in the Muslim world and elsewhere — and a catastrophe for the Iraqi people. And even if the Bush administration gets Iraq right, it has yet to establish the basic security needed to rebuild Afghanistan. If that country is ever to be free, democratic, and prosperous, the White House must be held to its promises to Kabul, and not just to those made to Baghdad.