Afghan Cabinet spends first week listening to woes

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The women's affairs minister spent her first three days on the job in tears, overwhelmed by a litany of tales about the suffering that Afghan women endured during five years of repressive Taliban rule.

"They were really traumatized so much that we just started crying," Sima Samar said. "We didn't know what else to do."

For some of the ministers in Afghanistan's interim government, the first week in office -- which ended Saturday -- was spent coming to face to face with the enormity of the task of shedding the country's dark, war-torn past.

With hopes for rebuilding high, but expectations realistic after decades of chaos, the ministers also began counting up what few resources they have.

"We are starting with almost nothing," Finance Minister Amin Arsala said, pointing out that the central bank has been looted. "It will take time to generate our own revenue and develop some sort of reserves. Initially we hope to receive some budgetary support from the international community."

Peacekeeper debate

Rebuilding the economy and the country will cost billions of dollars, he said. And some divisive issues have emerged, particularly the presence of foreign peacekeepers and the terms of an agreement that defines their role and numbers.

Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, whose soldiers still patrol the city, wants only 1,000 peacekeepers, saying another 1,000 can perform humanitarian work and 1,000 can stay at Bagram Air Force base, 36 miles north of Kabul, as a reserve force. He also wants the peacekeepers here for only six months.

But Prime Minister Hamid Karzai says they should stay as long as they are needed -- six months minimum -- and should number as many as 5,000.

Arsala insists that ordinary Afghans are united in wanting an international force to ensure peace and stability. Many predict that without peacekeepers, their new government will collapse into feuding groups.

Despite the U.N.-brokered agreement that calls for the withdrawal of Fahim's fighters from Kabul after the arrival of the first peacekeepers a week ago, some remain, piled into the back of pickup trucks with their guns and interfering in the capital's daily life, even traffic accidents.

Arsala said people don't expect much because they are scarred by the bitter feuding that marked the 1992-96 rule of Kabul by some of the same people now in power. Today, most people are putting their faith in the international community, he said.

"Most importantly, the world is paying attention to Afghanistan. A lot of expectations are on the shoulders of the international community, and if they don't play the right role, they will have done an injustice to the Afghan people," he said.

Shocked by conditions

The 30-member interim administration is to serve for six months before a council of tribal leader decides a two-year government and sets the way for a permanent constitution. Arsala said his first days on the job were spent meeting people -- and trying to make his office fit for work.

The Finance Ministry was heavily damaged by factional fighting and neglected by the Taliban. The windows were broken and the roof of one section collapsed from rocket fire. In some rooms, yellowed files in soiled folders are stacked to the ceiling. The few desks and chairs are broken, the hallways littered with dirt swept to the side.

"Frankly, when I came to the ministry I was shocked at the physical condition, the financial condition, the lack of institutional strength," said Arsala, who was foreign minister in the pre-Taliban government of then-President Burhanuddin Rabbani, whose loyalists and partners flattened entire neighborhoods during factional fighting.

Samar has an even more daunting task: There never has been a women's affairs ministry, so for the time being she has no building, no staff and no budget. For now, women -- all still wearing the all-enveloping burqa mandated by the Taliban -- find her at her newly acquired home, sitting on a carpeted floor.

But proudly, she says with a laugh: "I am the only minister who doesn't have a gunman standing outside."

Wearing a thin white scarf that barely covered her short-cropped brown hair, Samar is a blunt talker. She bemoaned her countrymen's bad luck with leaders.

Rabbani's regime was not much better than the rigidly Islamic Taliban movement that ousted it in 1996 and is now reviled by most of the world as allies of terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden, she said.

She has been horrified by the stories from scores of women. One woman recalled seeing a Taliban beat a woman with a glass bottle because she lifted her burqa to quiet her crying child.

"First of all I think security is the main issue," Samar said. "I think as soon as the men with the Kalashnikovs are out of the city, the women will be sure no harm will come to them and they will take off their burqas. Right now they don't feel safe."