9/11: One year on.. Back to Afghanistan.. A nation clinging to peace.

Byline: ANTON ANTONOWICZ

DEAD. Scores injured. Blood in the streets. And Afghanistan is draped in shock once more.

Almost a year since the War on Terror was declared, the terrorists have struck again at the heart of the nation which spawned them.

And fragile peace hangs like a leaf in a storm.

The bombs which caused panic in Kabul last Thursday and the attempted assassination of President Hamid Karzai were a clear message: no one is safe in this country. The Holy War goes on.

During the last week, I have travelled the country trying to measure Afghanistan's future. It has been a bittersweet journey.

On the edge of the Dasht-e-Leili desert, bleached bones lie beneath my feet. They are all that is left of scores of innocent people murdered and left to rot by Taliban troops.

Fifty yards away, 900 bodies are buried in a pit, the corpses are of those murderers and their allies.

I am standing on war crimes. First, the slaughter of civilians plucked from their homes by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Second, the murder of these fighters when they, in turn, became prisoners.

The dead here, and the horrific way they were killed is one of the dirty little secrets of this Afghan war. And it shows how far we are from winning a real peace.

Crammed inside the nearby Shibarghan prison are 1,260 PoWs. Afghans and Pakistanis, Taliban and al-Qaeda. They made the 36-hour journey there in containers. Those who died, suffocated.

"Death by container" is a well-used form of mass murder in Afghanistan. Five years ago, 1,250 Taliban were left under the desert sun in the metal boxes. Their bodies were grilled black. A year later, the Taliban killed several hundred Northern Alliance men in the same way.

Mohammed Kol, regional head of security, says the only ones to die this time were war-wounded who could not last the journey and some 50 others whose container fell off its truck.

The Pentagon endorses that. In a confidential memo, the UN, frightened of setting off another round of Afghan slaughter, says it is better to let sleeping dogs lie. Humans rights investigators say otherwise. So do the survivors.

As we toured the jail, a Pakistani prisoner smuggled us a note, claiming the captives had been told they would be taken from Kunduz to Kandahar.

It said: "We were deceived. We were stopped at Char Dara where US army and local commanders searched us and snatched everything we had. They loaded us nearly 200 to a truck. They buried some of our friends alive who were seriously wounded.

"At Mazar-e-Sharif they shifted us into containers. We were in them all night. The next morning we set off. We had no source of oxygen. There was suffocation. They did it deliberately."

The note-writer was a 19-year-old from Islamabad. Like all the Pakistanis we met, he claimed he joined the Taliban in response to a call by his local mullah. He thought he was fighting "jihad."

He said: "I was brainwashed. The jihad is over. But the treatment which killed my friends is something I will never forget. There are many here who will have revenge for that."

Others say the fight is not over, that one day they will be freed - and that they will return.

Many of their leaders did escape. They had money and bolt-holes ready, unlike their disciples. And they are re-grouping.

T HE Americans admit as much, but claim al-Qaeda is crippled, too busy hiding to inflict damage.

A US Defence official said: "Perhaps we could have got them wholesale, but now we're doing it retail. It doesn't make much difference. We're getting them."

But other intelligence experts say that al-Qaeda has changed its form. Now it has established cells with no centre of co-ordination. Cells, like diseased microbes, acting independently, with a common aim. And, they say, the worst is to come.

The Afghan war, meanwhile, is far from over and its main mission has not been accomplished.

President Hamid Karzai has to rely on US Special Forces as his bodyguards because he cannot trust his own. It probably saved his life last week. Two of his ministers have been killed. Thousands of al-Qaeda men have fled to fight again.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admits they do not know whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive.

Intelligence officers monitoring electronic transmissions say lack of chatter suggests he is alive. "If he were dead, his followers would talk about it," I was told.

Two captured Taliban officials claim seeing him on the Pakistan border. As for the rest, nothing. Nothing, but reports of hundreds of al-Qaeda fleeing to Iran or to Russian Muslim states. And from there around the world, to watch, wait and conspire.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan stumbles towards the future.

The road from the desert leads east to Mazar-e-Sharif, General Abdul Rashid Dostum's domain. I wait for three hours for him.

When he arrives the square is lined with 76 Land Cruisers and men with every kind of weapon. Dostum's armour-plated Audi, is led by a flashing Mercedes and two car-loads of bodyguards.

Once inside, he lectures local commanders on the need to hand in any arms not condoned by him. He is deputy defence minister in the new government. As he fiddles with his Hugo Boss tie, he tells the commanders to dispense with their armoured 4WDs. Feuds will end. Afghanistan is at peace and he will damn well make sure of that.

He is the boss. Suddenly this brutal man of war who once supported the Russians, then the fundamentalists, then the Northern Alliance and now Hamid Karzai, is a man of peace with a sober suit to match.

A man who issues his own bank notes. A man lording it from his palace in Shibarghan. A man grown fabulously wealthy from his private airline smuggling goods from Dubai. A man of peace who wants all the guns and rockets and regional power so that he can help his country stand upright once more.

I TRY not to laugh as we make the tortuous eight-hour journey to Kabul.

We stop near Sawz Sang where in February I saw doctors fight in vain to save Qwadrat, 10, and his six-year-old sister after they were blown up by a landmine.

The fields are still littered with the deadly devices. At Bagram airfield, we stop at the US base and see the still-smoking remains of an ambulance which ran over an anti-tank mine, leaving four dead and 18 injured.

And finally, Kabul...

Bibi Khatera is nine years old and lives on the front line. The home in which she was born is long destroyed.

But she and her family have returned to the capital. Their new home is a shell, one among thousands rendered into rubble.

Even after nine months of peace-of-sorts, there is little to help these people back on their feet.

There are 14 people in Bibi's extended family. Her father, Said Agha, is 50 and looks 75. He earns 70p a day pushing carts. His eldest son Abdullah receives pounds 34 a month as a government clerk.

Said says: "We took over this house because no one else wanted it. We haven't enough money for building material so we scavenge.

"Aid? A French woman once brought us a sack of charcoal. Nothing else apart from that."

A girl, curious about the strange visitors, edges closer. Rahima is 11 or 12, she's not sure. She holds her two-year-old brother Roman, who is limping from a shrapnel wound.

Said gestures with his scarred arm and says: "At least I am alive and able to earn something for them all." He is right. In 1998, the Red Cross reported that 98,000 Afghan families were headed by a widow and 63,000 headed by a disabled person.

A Red Cross unit in Kabul produces more artificial limbs than anywhere in the world. It is the nation's most successful factory.

Said looks at his two daughters and says: "These children have seen things no child should see.

"Men with swords cutting off the heads of our friends. People set on fire. Their playmates blown apart.

"Thank God we have peace at last. But it is a bare peace. Peace hanging like a leaf in a storm."

The housing shortage has led to intimidation and bribery. Families who managed to remain in Kabul through two decades of war are forced to provide ancient title rights or face eviction within two days.

IT is easy for President Karzai to speak of the Afghan nation. But Afghans no longer refer to themselves that way.

They barely bother calling themselves Pashtun or Tajik. Now they are confined to their own close community. A valley. A town. And, most of all, a warlord.

This is the chaos to which the world's aid organisations are trying to bring a semblance of order. But the money they bring has distorted the economy. The lucky Afghans are those working for western agencies. They, at least, have well-paid jobs.

A driver can earn pounds 160 a month and more. Why remain a doctor earning a third of that?

And so you see medics ferrying western charity workers in their four-wheel drives or working as mine-disposal operatives because the money's so much better.

As for the prosperous few who returned from abroad, they have the start-up cash to buy houses, cars and a future. The so-called "Gucci guerrillas" who find themselves in high government posts or opening computer stores and hotels. My old friend Ali Zohra, 54, complains: "Where were they when we defeated the Russians? Where were they when the warlords shelled us? Or when the Taliban and their Arab friends whipped us?"

Ali is a qualified engineer but has a lowly clerical job in the planning ministry. He laughs. "It has a lot of planning to do," he says.

Swedish aid expert Anders Fange agrees with him. He says: "It will take 10 to 15 years before there is the central authority needed for the development of the country. And perhaps I'm being optimistic."

Meanwhile people fend for themselves. The promised pounds 2billion in aid drips pitifully slow. Businessmen hold on to their cash, waiting for the new currency to arrive. Foreign capital largely sits on the sideline waiting for signs of real stability.

Police and army melt away because of meagre pay.

Farmers return to the old ways. In 2001, the Taliban bent to Western pressure and banned the cultivation of opium poppy, reducing heroin production by 91 per cent.

This year, it is feared the total yield of raw opium will leap from 185 tonnes to 2,000 tonnes.

Warlords oversee the deadly harvest, which finances their private armies and ambitions. Drug money keeps them in power and the country in disarray.

Bernard Frahi, head of the UN's Drug Control Programme in Kabul, said: "The government has launched a courageous campaign aimed at eradicating the poppy fields but, of course, the enforcement structure is not yet in place."

UNTIL then, the heroin will continue to pour on to the streets of London, Glasgow and Dublin, despite Tony Blair's declaration last September that the war on terrorism "is also a frontline war on drugs".

There is an alternative. A highly-placed western intelligence official told me: "There are only a handful of men whose deaths would secure a measure of peace in Afghanistan and a real challenge to the drug trade."

His hit-list includes Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Saudi-supported ex-Mujahedeen leader, now hiding in eastern Afghanistan, who this week declared his own jihad against the government and its allies; and "man of peace" General Dostum.

Precisely what their assassinations would achieve is unclear. But it is a token of the West's frustration that such ideas are being voiced.

Meanwhile, Kabul itself tries to come to terms with this fledgling hope the West has helped conjure. Laughing girls in headscarves return to school for the first time in six years. More women, though still a fraction, desert the burkha.

Market stalls testify to these people's ability to coax life from killing fields. There are mountains of grapes and mulberries.

Mr Kandy, the carpet-seller in Chicken Street, tells me: "Mr Anton, business is prettier at last, especially when you Britishers are here."

The pessimists give Afghanistan no more than two years before bloodshed flows again. The weekly bomb blasts, makeshift chemical weapons labs and die-hard Taliban hiding and biding their time, are sufficient evidence and sinister warning.

The optimists speak of the need for real investment and financial aid to raise the country from its knees.

While bones bleach in the desert, new enmities join old ones. A nation hangs like that leaf in a storm.

And a remarkably resilient people struggling with this "bare" peace step over the dead towards tomorrow.

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