Iraq may be on the American brain, but Afghanistan reappears this week on the calendar. Monday marked exactly 15 months since our first bombs struck Kabul in the dark hours of Oct. 7, 2001. Time for another quarterly report, once again calculated in terms of buzkashi, the great Afghan equestrian game.

On the surface buzkashi is all about grabbing an animal carcass and galloping off. But beneath the wild spectacle lie deeper political concerns: To what extent is the game’s sponsor – every buzkashi has one – able to control its volatile and violent events? And, accordingly, is his general reputation for mastery – on which others will calculate future allegiance – rising or falling? The sponsor, rather than the riders and the horses, has most to gain or lose.

Afghanistan for the past 15 months has been an American buzkashi. Our country, personified by its president, took and still takes the lead. How has George W. Bush fared as a buzkashi sponsor over the last quarter of 2002?

The “game” in this analogy is Afghan pacification and reconstruction, but our reputational stakes are worldwide. U.S. action in Afghanistan remains our most vivid and publicly observable response to 9-11. So, like buzkashi, it’s a proving ground. Will American success attract followers to future Bush initiatives, most immediately an attack on Iraq? Or, as in a buzkashi gone wrong, will other players – both at home and abroad – begin riding away?

Our first quarter’s involvement, back in fall 2001, routed the Taliban and wowed the world. And if we paid friendly forces (mostly northern alliance) $70 million for their pains, so what? Afghanistan is no longer – at least not now – a safe haven for al-Qaida. Subsequent gains include the installation – but only partial consolidation – of a moderate government, and the promise – if hardly the fulfillment – of national reconstruction.

Note the syntactical hitches. Were these words in video format, we’d have a split screen. On one side, impressive accomplishment. On the other, ongoing dysfunction and a fear that one single bullet – one – could bring back political vacuum and national chaos. Obscuring the picture are ever more issues and actors. Here again, it’s like a buzkashi in which the animal carcass itself is sometimes hard to see. “Great clouds of dust hide much of the central action. Powerful men on powerful horses mass with one another in a mayhem of frantic movement: pushing and shoving and changing position. … The men are now yelling past one another at the top of their lungs and now urging their horses onwards with a incongruously soft hiss.” What follows is an attempt to penetrate dust clouds, yelling, and hissing.

First the positives. Topping my list, albeit little ballyhoo-ed elsewhere, is this past fall’s currency reform. 15 months ago the Afghani (in three rival variants) traded at more than 100,000 to the dollar: a source of grim jest, shame, and despair. To change a hundred bucks, you’d trundle to the money bazaar with, literally, a big garbage bag. The new bills, with hologram but (mercifully) without any leader’s mugshot, currently go at a respectable 46-to-1, more valuable than the Pakistani rupee. Folks may still be poor, but at least their bank notes once again mean something. Legitimacy is re-created from just such mundane, everyday affairs. Most ironically encouraging development: a spate of brand new forgeries. Counterfeiting, like any serious imitation, flatters the original and confirms its worth.

My second positive (likewise unspectacular per se) is the absence of further assassination attempts on key government figures. 2002 witnessed the killing of a cabinet minister and a vice-president. President Karzai was nearly shot in September. Whether by luck or better security (most of it, unfortunately, provided by non-Afghans) there’s been no recent recurrence. As with re-valued Afghani notes, so with increased big-wig safety: Both add to the all-important sense of renewed normalcy.

A third opportunity for restoring routine presents itself this month with the hajj season. 2002’s pilgrimage of Afghans to Mecca went wrong from the start and culminated, disastrously, in the Civil Aviation minister’s being killed at his own main airport. “Last year we weren’t prepared,” says a government spokesman. “We didn’t have enough airplanes, enough departure points. This year we are ready.” Islamic authority has traditionally been tasked with facilitating the pilgrimage. If all goes well for this year’s 25,000 scheduled pilgrims, legitimacy will get a further boost.

Other positives are grabbing bigger headlines. Congress passed a four-year, $3.3 billion aid bill for Afghanistan. Please note, Mr. President, that $1 billion was initially earmarked for expanding the – gasp! – multilateral International Security and Assistance Force without which there’d be no semblance of peace today. Road reconstruction is underway, and our government is helping rebuild Radio Afghanistan. Both developments can help overcome topographical and ethnic divisions.

Hamid Karzai continues to fly the flag at international conferences. Oslo, Bonn and New York have all been treated recently to his elegant charisma. Afghanistan could have no better spokesman abroad. The world responds with generous pledges, some of which will be kept. Promises of non-interference have come – likewise best taken with a grain of salt – from the six nations that border Afghanistan. And the long-conceived 1,465-kilometer Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline was finally, officially authorized by Karzai in concert with Turkmenistan (source of oil) and Pakistan (Indian Ocean outlet). Another tidbit for President Bush: Which of your petro-associates and current advisors were in bed with the Taliban when this pipeline notion was last taken seriously in the late 1990s?

The above developments make Bush seem like a successful buzkashi sponsor, a proven master of events, someone to follow in future designs. Sadly, there’s more to it. The split screen has a negative side. And the negatives,

if not necessarily growing, show

few signs of going away.

Some downsides have been there all along and are now simply getting more press. Examples: abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody, and production of opium. Both are important, lamentable, but to some extent inevitable. Neither should distract attention from the main concern: day-to-day security. Two basic security threats remain unresolved.

One is the continued fragmentation of power in the hands of warlords. These have been variously spawned and supported by the United States, sometimes to good effect. But from the standpoint of Karzai – whom we also created and on whom we’ve pinned all our hopes – the warlords now represent embarrassment rather than empowerment. Despite protestations of loyalty, they ignore central government edicts, pocket customs revenues, hoard their military hardware, make war on one another, and render the countryside effectively off-limits to concerted reconstruction. They’ve got to go, sooner the better. And the vaunted Afghan National Army, a classic Bush defense fantasy, is years away from getting it done. Latest Pentagon plan: 10 Joint Regional Teams to expand on the excellent work done by the US special forces CHICLETS (see this column, May 22, 2002). Will these JRTs be better than nothing? Certainly. As good as an expanded ISAF? Certainly not.

The second threat comes from dissident Pashtuns and al-Qaida remnants. Key names for future reference: former prime minister and vicious arch-opportunist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, former Taliban defense minister Jalalludin Haqqani, and very possibly Osama bin Laden. These lurk along Afghanistan’s ever troublesome southeastern border, now more subversive than ever because of Islamist victories in Pakistani provincial elections. Operation Enduring Freedom has been stalemated here since last spring. Tensions rise, civilian casualties mount, and American soldiers get bushwhacked. Still the bad guys come and go with impunity … and bullets. One single bullet, God forbid, could fell Hamid Karzai. For this reason, he seldom ventures outside Kabul and risks becoming an Afghan Gorbachev: far more visible and celebrated overseas than at home. His fall would turn our whole Afghan effort into utter shambles. And likewise U.S. credibility worldwide.

So a recent Bush personnel deployment may be premature. Zalmay Khalilzad, the president’s “Special Envoy” for Afghanistan, has been point man for policy since our efforts began 15 months ago. Henceforth he’ll also be “Special Envoy and Ambassador at Large for Free Iraqis.”

Khalilzad was born in Afghanistan and doubtless knows this time-honored maxim: “You can’t,” the Afghan saying goes, “hold two watermelons in one hand.” Let’s not fumble Afghanistan. Other watermelons can wait.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract. Editor’s note: The second edition of Dr. Azoy’s definitive study, “Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan,” is newly available from Waveland Press.