Women’s rights activists are particularly disappointed by the election. “The results are disturbing indeed,” offers Naba al-Barrak of New Hope for Women, an Iraq-based group. “People chose to vote for sectarian reasons, which is very sad.” Her group had hoped that voters would find the liberal agenda of the more secular parties attractive, while also trying to break the Arab mentality of supporting one’s tribe or clan over one’s individual rights. Yet the portrait of the country that emerged from the election, she says, “is the face of tribal loyalties.”

What’s also dismaying to activists is that the election appears to conflict with what Iraqi women really want. Women for Women International, an American-Iraqi advocacy group, recently conducted a survey of Iraqi women and found that high percentages of them expect a role in the reconstruction of Iraq. “Many Iraqi leaders have claimed that women do not want to be involved in the reconstruction process,” Women for Women founder Zainab Salbi said in a statement. “This survey clearly shows that women overwhelmingly believe they should have a seat at the table.” The survey also reveals that Iraqi women expect equal rights — 94 percent want legal protection as women, and 84 percent want to vote on the final constitution.

Perhaps the most outspoken activist is Yanar Mohammed of the Iraqi Communist Party. A petite woman who speaks perfect English from years of living in Canada, Mohammed moves constantly in Iraq due to death threats, and uses a small entourage of armed bodyguards to protect her. “I get the [threatening] e-mails and I know religious extremists want to keep me from talking to women but” she shrugs.

It’s pretty clear why a Shiite ticket, endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and led by a coalition of religious groups headed by Abdul Hakim Aziz, would not be happy with Mohammed, a woman whose newspaper recently used a sardonic editorial to propose that if Iraqi men are allowed to take multiple wives, then Iraqi women should then opt for multiple husbands.

As Mohammed points out, the name of Aziz’s group — Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq — and its close relationship to Iranian clerics, hardly bodes well for a secular Iraq. Last year, during efforts to create an interim constitution, SCIRI led a group of conservative Islamicists to overturn much of the family law that Saddam used to grant women equal rights. Far from a feminist utopia, the Baath Party did allow a larger role for women than most Arab countries, in no small part because Iraq’s men were being killed by the hundreds of thousands in a series of wars from 1979 until 2003.

“Iraqi women can be quite outspoken,” Mohammed says. “And there’s not as much fear among them as you see in places like Kuwait, Saudi and other Arab countries.” Yet she is cynical about the prospect of women gaining equal rights under a new Iraqi government.

“Our position was to boycott the election because the winner was going to be a cleric from Iran — bred with its version of Islamic fascism — or Allawi, a Baathist,” she says. “Not one of them will do anything to help women. And how can a people in search of a secular state have an election in which [Sistani] mandated participation as a religious duty?”

Women, Mohammed adds, continue to suffer under religious rule. “The moment Saddam’s regime closed down, Iraq became infiltrated by [Sunni] Wahhabi extremists, Iranian intelligence and others, who are heavily funded from outside Iraq,” she says. “This is what we see all over the world, political Islam imposing religion on politics. It started with sanctions here [in the 1990s] and continues all throughout the Muslim world. When you are isolated from the rest of the world, religion becomes your way out.”

Mohammed says she often tries to reason with Shiite religious leaders. “I ask them about why every woman in Najaf [the site of the shrine of the Imam Ali] wears the abaya [a veil that covers the body and face] and they tell me, ‘Oh, it’s voluntary,’” she recounts with contempt. “You’re telling me every last woman in Najaf wears the abaya because she wants to? None of them are forced by their husbands, by their brothers? All of them? I can’t even talk to these people!”

So Mohammed has stopped talking and is now trying to form a coalition of secular, educated Iraqis to fight for a party that will remove all mention of religion from the new Iraqi government. Or at least participate in the next government with those goals in mind.

“I would like a socialist Iraq free of mention of gender, race, and religion,” she says. “Start with a secular government and adopt the Geneva Convention on Human Rights. We want to end the American occupation of Iraq, so the Wahhabis and Iranian intelligence people stop coming here.”

When I point out that it seems unlikely that the foreign jihadis and Iraqi Sunni and Shiite radicals will retreat from their battles when the Americans leave, she disagrees. “The American presence gives legitimacy to these radicals in the eyes of the people,” she argues. “It’s like the Americans are a big hive of honeybees. The bear will leave when the honey is gone.”

Women for Women founder Salbi, however, says the issue surrounding equality in Iraq is not so black and white. In an interview with Newsweek, she agrees that an Iranian-like government ruled by religion poses a real danger to women. “And if you see what’s happening toward women, in terms of the violence that’s targeted toward them, in terms of the culture becoming more conservative, then the indicators show that it may be like that,” she says. “Religious leaders definitely are the ones to be watched, clearly, but secular leaders as well. ‘Religious,’ by definition, doesn’t mean ‘bad toward women,’ and ‘secular,’ by definition, doesn’t mean ‘good toward women.’ We need to look at the substance of both of them.”

Real proof of Iraqi’s women’s political strength, however, will come in the creation of a new constitution much later this year. “The election was not the most critical point,” Salbi tells Newsweek. “The constitution-drafting committee, that’s the most critical point. If women are not represented in the drafting of the constitution, most critically they’re going to lose their rights. And usually these rights are represented through family law: custody, divorce, inheritance, work opportunities, representation — all of these things.”

Right now in Iraq, the days mark the festival of “Moharam,” a 40-day event that represents the Shiite mourning period of the defeat of the Imam Hussein, son of Imam Ali, whom the Shiite consider the rightful leader of Islam after the death of the prophet Mohammed. After years of strife, Hussein was slain in battle near the Iraqi city of Karbala almost 1,400 years ago, a moment that relegated the Shiite into minority status in the Islamic world.

At the holy Shrine Imam Khadam in central Baghdad, pilgrims are arriving for the ritual flaying, chest-pounding and hitting themselves in the head with swords, a tribute to the suffering of Hussein to protect Islam. On the eve of taking power for the first time in Iraq, Shiite pilgrims crawl on the street, praying in tribute to Hussein for his and their loss. It’s a momentous thing to witness.

To speak to the people about the new Iraq is heartwarming. “We are not like Iran, we are Arab Shiite, we love our Sunna brothers, Christians, Jews,” says one man. “We want a government for all Iraqi people.” If the Shiite can indeed harness the sense of self-sacrifice that they have shown their leaders for hundreds of years, whether on the field at Karbala or in defying Saddam, and find a middle ground with their political opponents, maybe Iraq does have a chance for a representative, egalitarian government — one that incorporates lasting and equal rights for women.

Before it proved itself militarily superior to Fatah, however, Hamas had already proved itself superior to its corrupt, fragmented rival in cementing support among the Palestinian public. Fatah became infamous for diverting foreign aid into the private offshore accounts of its leaders, while Hamas built its reputation funding education and healthcare. More than its militant Islamic fundamentalism, success in providing social services helped Hamas beat Fatah in parliamentary elections in January 2006, a crucial step in becoming the dominant force in the territories. An incident in the Gaza Strip shows how Hamas rallies popular opinion by steering help directly to the impoverished Palestinian public — but also how the fortunes of any one faction are often only marginally relevant to the average citizens who bear the brunt of the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.

Last summer, in the Beit Hanoun refugee camp in the northeastern corner of Gaza, local teenagers played lots of soccer. Like teenage boys around the world, the kids of Beit Hanoun followed the matches of the World Cup obsessively. Every day the boys would watch the games and then run out onto a dusty, rock-strewn field a kilometer from the fence that separates Gaza from Israel and mimic the moves of their favorite players.

Even after the final between France and Italy on July 9, the boys kept playing. They played despite the fact that the fields of Beit Hanoun, surrounded by clumps of trees and patches of alfalfa and onions, are the site of a more dangerous game. Gaza’s militants use the fields to shoot Qassam rockets over the nearby fence, trying and nearly always failing to hit targets in the southern Israeli town of Sederot. The Israelis respond from placements just beyond the fence with tank and artillery “counter-battery” fire. Militants try to set up the rockets, launch them and then flee before the shells come hurtling back at them.

On July 11, militants fired rockets from the edge of the field while the kids of Beit Hanoun were playing soccer. The militants left, just before an Israeli missile came crashing down and killed three boys, Mahfouth Farid Nuseir, Ahmad Ghalib Abu Amsha and Ahmad Fathi Shabat, all reported to be 16 years old.

The locals had long asked the militants not to use the field as a launching pad because it endangered the kids. During the early summer of 2006, neither Hamas nor Fatah had used the field to fire Qassams, but not out of deference to neighborhood parents. They had agreed to a cease-fire with the Israelis and were, for the most part, observing it. The militant group Islamic Jihad, however, was not observing the cease-fire and often used the spot to lob rockets into Israel. None of the average citizens of Beit Hanoun had the wasta, the Arabic word for influence or clout, to get the militants to stop altogether.

Three weeks later, on July 31, militants again tried to use the field as a launching pad while Beit Hanoun’s boys were playing soccer. They set up in a clump of trees and prepared to fire their rockets, but this time the Israeli tank shells came raining down before they could launch a single Qassam. An Israeli tank shell burst next to Nahid Mohammed Fawzi al-Shanbari and killed him instantly. Press reports gave his age as 16, and conflated his death with the earlier casualties on the same field, but though he was tall, lean and athletic, Nahid was actually only 12 when he died.

When a family member dies in the Palestinian territories, there’s a three-day mourning period in which friends, relatives and just about everyone else around town comes over to sit with the family in support. And like any gathering of Arabs, this requires lots of tea, coffee and lunch. The funerals themselves, particularly when Israeli munitions are responsible for the death, can also become propaganda opportunities for whichever political faction claimed the allegiance of the deceased. In Gaza, nearly every family has at least a loose affiliation with one of the militant groups or political parties. Family and party affiliation is the source of jobs, education, income and status. It is not uncommon for the party to defray the costs of a funeral, since the price of tea and cakes and enforced hospitality can be hard for the average Palestinian in the camps to handle. A Palestinian without a party has no wasta at all.

Mohammed al-Shanbari, Nahid’s father, had no wasta. An unemployed laborer who lost his job in Israel when the intifada began back in 2000, he had nine surviving children and two wives to support and really couldn’t afford all those beverages and lunches. But his only party affiliation was with an obscure and long-dormant Marxist offshoot of the dimly remembered People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which gave him a tenuous tie to the present-day Fatah.

After his son’s death, Shanbari went to officials of Fatah, the most powerful party in Beit Hanoun, and asked for help. Shanbari told them he considered his son a martyr to the Palestinian cause and needed a little money to put on a proper funeral. In return, Fatah would have the benefit of claiming Nahid as its own for propaganda purposes.

Fatah did offer to lead the funeral, complete with political theater to highlight the plight of the people of Gaza. But Fatah didn’t offer him any money, in part, Shanbari suspects, because he belonged to the obscure PFLP subgroup and has never been that politically active anyway.

Shanbari went away empty-handed. And then the guys from Fatah’s bitterest rivals, Hamas, showed up at his door.

Hamas offered to pay Shanbari $150 a month for three months if they could make Nahid a Hamas shahid, or martyr. Shanbari said yes. In exchange for the money, he permitted Nahid’s image to become part of a poster. The 12-year-old’s image was covered with Hamas logos and surrounded by masked fighters holding weapons. The posters were plastered all over the Beit Hanoun camp, where many of them remain eight months later, faded and torn amid the dozens of other tributes to slain militants that cover the walls and lampposts of Gaza. Hamas also handled the funeral, with its armed militants leading the procession, and paid for all the tea, coffee and lunch.

Hamas had once again proved itself better than Fatah in meeting the needs of the average Palestinian. What neither of the two leading factions in the occupied territories could or would do, however, was put a stop to the firing of rockets from the Beit Hanoun soccer field. They are still asking the militants to stop, just as they were before the deaths of the boys on July 11 and the death of Nahid al-Shanbari on July 31. “We beg them and beg them to stop,” said one local man, “but they don’t listen. And if we complain too much, maybe they will think we are informers for the Israelis.”

A call to a Hamas activist elicited a denial about offering Shanbari money to claim his son for Hamas posthumously. He said if any such money was given to the family, it was merely humanitarian in nature. And when asked about the posters, he suggested, “this is how it is done. The people want to honor the fallen, and this is how we grieve the martyrs from the occupation.” But he also refused to discuss the matter further. Other residents of Gaza said, off the record, that Shanbari’s story did not sound unusual.

Mohammed al-Shanbari, meanwhile, said he accepted a deal from a group he doesn’t even like or support. But he, alone among the wasta-less residents of Beit Hanoun, was able to stop the rocket fire. He used the $450 Hamas paid him to get his family out of the neighborhood altogether. He now lives in the Jabalya refugee camp. Unlike Beit Hanoun, with its pretty fields and trees, Jabalya is a crowded, unattractive jumble of brick houses and poorly paved streets burdened with trash heaps and crime. Hamas is, ironically, stronger in Jabalya than in Shanbari’s old home. And he remains unemployed. But now he and his family live five kilometers southwest of the deadly soccer field. He no longer has to worry about rockets, just the occasional gunfight between Hamas and Fatah, or intermittent Israeli airstrikes on other houses in his new neighborhood.

“Hamas wanted to buy a martyr. I wanted a decent funeral and to get my family out of Beit Hanoun,” he shrugged.

The damage to Ahmed’s body was so extensive that the elderly woman who attended the “refrigerator,” or morgue, didn’t pull the body tray completely out. In the deathly quiet of the cold, dank room, Hasan’s two friends carefully unwrapped the top of the white shroud stained with the young boy’s blood. Still not wanting to look directly at his son, Hasan, a security guard for the Kuwaiti Embassy, dipped his head toward his son’s face and let out a horrible cry of anguish.

Beirut has been heavily bombed in the past few weeks, but the Monday evening strike shocked many in the city by its apparent arbitrariness. The Chiyah neighborhood is home not to members of the anti-Israel Hezbollah Party but its secular Shiite rivals, the Amal movement. Having apparently underestimated the tenacity and preparedness of Hezbollah fighters, the Israel Defense Forces appear to be frustrated and, in the eyes of many Lebanese, are lashing out with deadly abandon at an increasingly random range of targets.

“They cannot win against the Hezbollah fighters, so they are killing civilians now,” said an angry man who only gave his name as Andre. He lived about 50 yards from the collapsed building in Chiyah and was thrown from his chair when the missile hit. “This is their logic of terrorism against the Lebanese people. Even people who have nothing to do with Hezbollah can now be killed. Who are the terrorists? Where are they?”

Andre and many other Lebanese say they are living in constant fear of an attack. Cars on southern roads are assumed to be holding Hezbollah fighters, so anyone driving south of the Litani River risks the danger of being killed in an assault. An apartment building in Qana may have had missiles fired from it, so the IDF leveled it. Bridges connecting Lebanon’s cities could have transported weapons for terrorists and so had to be destroyed. Apartment buildings in Haret Hreik were home to people who don’t fight for Hezbollah but supported them, so bombs flattened a square mile of the dense buildings. A dairy farm in the Beqaa Valley employed numerous Shiite men who tended to support Hezbollah, and so it too was bombed.

Politically, the bombing has backfired, as the people most likely to support an international campaign to pressure Hezbollah into disarming — Lebanon’s Christian, Sunni and Druze populations — find themselves under fire from their southern neighbor, and, they say, abandoned by the Western powers they have long tried to emulate. Political analysts in Beirut declare that Hezbollah is positioned to capitalize on the mood shift and entrench itself in Lebanese society.

“Since Israel could not and probably cannot have a real decisive victory, Hezbollah will claim a huge victory here,” said Mohammed Qabani, a member of the Lebanese Parliament representing Beirut’s Sunni community, and a political rival to Hezbollah. “Even if all of Lebanon is destroyed, Hezbollah will have won.” Qabani added that the Israeli response has damaged the work done in the past two decades to isolate Hezbollah politically. As Lebanon sought to solidify its independence, Hezbollah lost its influence by keeping close ties with Syria and maintaining its weapons. Criticism of Hezbollah came to a head on July 12, when it captured two IDF soldiers. But people’s distrust of Hezbollah is being eclipsed by Israel’s widespread bombing.

“There was criticism of Hezbollah for the ‘arrest’ of two IDF soldiers, but over time it became clear that this is an aggressive project to redraw the map of the Middle East,” said Qabani, who then offered his own rather farfetched theory behind Israel’s heated assault. “Lebanon is the only country in the Arab world that could be an economic competitor to Israel in tourism, high-tech and banking, so now people think it’s this capability Israel wants to destroy,” he said. “Israel thinks these attacks pressure us to isolate Hezbollah, but it doesn’t work anymore. We still have those fears and suspicions of each other, but they’re set aside while an enemy bombs us.”

One political commentator, known to have ties to Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, went so far as to say the group is willing to negotiate a regional peace plan with Israel. Sitting at a Beirut hotel bar, Ibrahim Moussawi wears a neat suit with no tie and speaks English well. He has a Ph.D. in theology and works as a news analyst for al-Manar, Hezbollah’s 24-hour news station. “Hezbollah has always been ready to negotiate,” he said. “It was ready immediately, according to Nasrallah, so why should that change now?”

Moussawi said that efforts by the Bush administration and Israel to paint the group as religious fanatics akin to al-Qaida is unfair. “Hezbollah is a reasonable organization,” he said. “They believe Islam is the best way to live and govern but they harbor no delusions about turning Lebanon and its other 17 sects into an Islamic state. A majority of Lebanon is Shiite, but being strong is not the same as being the whole country. They respect that other people are different.” Moussawi dismissed security as a motive for Israel’s warfare. “This is revenge for their defeat in 2000,” he said, referring to Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon that year. “And it is part of America’s foreign policy to pressure Iran over the nuclear issue. This is Israel being forced to do America’s bidding.”

Regardless of the truth of Moussawi’s claims, his rhetoric is embraced by many Lebanese incensed by the increasing tempo of Israel’s bombing campaign. On Sunday, after hearing a barrage of rockets rain down on areas surrounding Tyre, my driver and I fled before the Israeli response closed off the city. Leaving town we passed through a banana plantation where a makeshift bridge served as the last route over the Litani River that bisects south Lebanon. At the bridge, a convoy from the World Food Program headed into Tyre pushed us to the side of the road. Taking shelter under some trees with scared Lebanese soldiers, we could hear Israeli planes and drones overhead. An explosion sounded in the distance as one of the drones fired missiles into Tyre.

After the convoy passed, we sped away from danger into the relative safety of the north. It was only later that I learned what had transpired in that grove just minutes after we left. The convoy itself was hit, wounding a driver and killing the occupant of a nearby van. The bridge and banana plantation were completely destroyed. A series of airstrikes destroyed five cars of people trying to flee Tyre before the siege got worse.

Southern Lebanon is now completely off limits. Two major relief agencies have been told by the Israelis that any vehicles seen south of the river will be destroyed. The city of Tyre itself is completely out of gas so there’s not much chance people could leave anyway, but now relief supplies cannot come in. Hospitals are running out of medicine and fuel for their generators. Bodies are being dumped in mass graves because funerals are too dangerous.

In Beirut, things are not much better. The city is on its last gasp of gasoline. A three-hour wait gets you about 10 liters, and even that limited availability is expected to end in a few days. Electricity is growing more erratic and generators are running out of fuel, putting even hospitals at risk. Most have stopped accepting non-emergency patients to conserve resources for the badly wounded. Meanwhile, as the pace of airstrikes picked up, rescue crews in Chiyah planned to work through another night, pulling bodies out of the rubble.

He’s talking about the United Nations resolution that calls for Syria to militarily depart from Lebanon (done) and the disarming of both Hezbollah and a slew of armed factions in the Palestinian refugee community (currently under way via laser-guided airstrikes).

“Now we must let [the Israelis] end Hezbollah,” he continues. “They have started it and destroyed Lebanon. It has been cruel of them to do this, but it cannot be wasted. At least we can see them disarmed and then maybe there will be peace.”

Early on, most Lebanese agreed that Hezbollah’s operation to enter Israel and kidnap two Israeli soldiers was foolish and would draw a tough military response from the Israeli Defense Forces. Even Lebanese sympathetic to the group’s aims admitted that it was an act of war (they denied that it was a terrorist act), but said that they hoped Israel would negotiate a release of the Hezbollah prisoners who have been held for years without trials in Guantánamo-style Israeli jails, a harsh legacy of Israel and its proxies’ 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. Nobody, except perhaps Hezbollah’s top leadership, wanted a broad war couched in religious imagery. And even Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah was probably surprised at the ferocity of the Israeli attack.

The Israelis, and their backer the United States, have seized upon the border operation as a golden opportunity to savagely punish Hezbollah — and much of Lebanon, while they’re at it — by air. Perhaps remembering it couldn’t get the job done in 18 years of face-to-face fighting for control of south Lebanon, Israel has backed down from its earlier demand that Hezbollah be destroyed and disarmed and now seems to be settling for weakening Hezbollah, winning the return of its soldiers and establishing a security zone that will keep Hezbollah’s rockets out of range of its border towns and cities.

But even as the Israelis have slightly softened their position, they have continued to smash not just Hezbollah, but Lebanon itself. An Israeli official promised to set the country back 20 years after the Hezbollah attack, and Israel is keeping its word. With the U.S. granting Israel another week to continue its attacks, anything that might conceivably be a Hezbollah asset, and many things that are not, are being bombed. Civilians, who are inevitably going to be killed by aerial bombardment, no matter how accurate, are deemed acceptable collateral damage. There are constant airstrikes against Hezbollah neighborhoods and military positions, Lebanese infrastructure (at least what remains of it) and occasionally against the Lebanese military, which is trying to stay out of the fight as much as possible but which Israel holds responsible for helping Hezbollah, including supposedly helping with a missile strike that severely damaged an Israeli destroyer. On Tuesday, Israeli planes struck a Lebanese army barracks in Kfar Chima near Beirut, killing 11 soldiers. They hit it because they had spotted Hezbollah forces transporting a two-stage missile nearby and were angry the Lebanese army had ignored a giant missile that could hit Tel Aviv being towed 200 meters outside its front gate.

Wednesday was Lebanon’s bloodiest day yet. Israeli attacks killed 61 people, all but one of them civilians. Two hundred and ninety-seven Lebanese, all but a handful of them civilians, have been killed by Israeli bombs. Twenty-nine Israelis, most of them also civilians, have died.

On Tuesday morning, I made a trip deep into the heart of Haret Hreik, the southern suburb that is home to much of Hezbollah’s political operations and leadership. In the last few days, the massive Israeli aerial bombardment appears to have begun to take a toll on the Shiite fighters.

So far Hezbollah has only admitted to suffering a handful of casualties. Hezbollah men are sleeping in public bunkers. There are also thought to be secret bunkers that hold the leadership. They have only a skeletal force in Haret Hreik, but seem to be able to muster lots of guys if they need them.

Entire blocks of the neighborhood have been destroyed, turned inside out, throwing a fine mist of concrete and white smoke over the landscape. The streets are empty save a handful of Hezbollah fighters armed with light weapons and walkie-talkies, moving around on foot and by scooter to secure official sites.

Two days ago, journalists venturing into the area were greeted almost warmly after a brief but intense credential check and discussion of nationality, and were allowed to work within certain guidelines: Specific buildings were off-limits. The handful of civilians entering to check on their mostly destroyed homes would regale reporters with an impromptu song and dance about how “God is the greatest” and how “With our blood and souls we will redeem you, Sayeed Hassan Nasrallah,” while picking through the flotsam and jetsam of their now dispersed belongings. The mood was defiant, almost a little festive. The Hezbollah fighters and supporters felt elated at the chance to fight the Israelis, even if only with their own resilience and the pride of knowing their rocket-firing kin to the south continue to make sure northern Israel is also sleeping poorly and below ground.

Such visits would continue for a little while until the Hezbollah gunmen would suddenly run away, screaming, “Ef-attash, Ef-attash, yallah, yallah!” (Arabic for “F-16, F-16, let’s go, let’s go!”) At this point there would be a mass sprint to the journalists’ cars, where Lebanese drivers were sitting sweating in the summer humidity, listening out the open windows for the telltale sound of jet engines. Then it would be off at 100 miles an hour down the bombed-out streets of Beirut’s airport road toward the relative safety of downtown, inevitably chased by the sound of bombs exploding behind.

But on the most recent trip, the Hezbollah guys look tired and more than a bit tense. The devastated area seems even bigger and barricades have been set up along with roadblocks of rubble, concrete blocks knocked off of bombed highway overpasses. The fighters are less willing to chat or allow pictures.

“Just keep moving, it’s not safe and no pictures,” one fighter tells me at one such roadblock. His face looks tired and resigned. Not ready to give up after seven nights of taking it on the chin from an unseen enemy whose bombs rarely miss, but not ready to sing any songs either.

The relentless Israeli pounding has displaced 500,000 people across Lebanon, according to Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. Some have gone to the Beqaa Valley, others to the mountains, to Syria, and to schools. It’s hard to nail down a figure because so many people have gone to their families due to cut roads. Beirut is not swamped, but it is full.

The south is almost completely cut off from the rest of the country. Israeli bombing has destroyed not only all the modern postwar highways but also the secondary roads and bridges through the southern Beqaa Valley and Chouf Mountains. Reporters who venture in — and some estimates put it at 12 hours to get into the besieged ancient Crusader city of Tyre, if you manage to get there at all — do not come back out, at least for now, and neither do any refugees. Much of the population of southern Lebanon has left for Beirut or other parts of the country, but in a school in central Beirut, the refugees tell me that no one new has come since Saturday and there is still room. People just can’t get out and have to take their chances under what is clearly heavy bombardment.

The refugees sleeping in the middle school classrooms are pretty irritated at the Western media. All of them are Shiite and the total lack of fighting-age men gives the impression that these are Hezbollah-related families, although they don’t really want to talk about that. They have been watching CNN International’s coverage of the war and are convinced that it’s biased against the civilians of Lebanon, who have been dying at a rate 10 times greater than their Israeli counterparts.

“All we see are Israelis in their bunkers talking about how terrified they are that Hezbollah rockets are aimed at civilians. What about our civilians?” asks Mohammed, who looks to be about 12 and speaks almost perfect English as he sits with his mother and young sisters.

“They are bombing civilians from Tyre to Baalbek [in the northern Beqaa Valley]. Do we not count?” he says. “Why does CNN only tell the story of the Jews? They had better not come to this school because they don’t want people to know what the Israelis are doing to us.”

Mohammed says Hezbollah did nothing wrong when it crossed the border and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. He claims the soldiers were an occupying force, although they were actually taken captive in pre-1967 Israel. He also repeats the familiar charge that the Israelis occupy the Shebaa Farms, a tiny area that almost no one in Lebanon except for Hezbollah supporters considers anything more than a tiny sliver of Syria.

But Mohammed is spot on about Israelis targeting civilian infrastructure. The IDF seems intent on breaking the back of Lebanon as a viable country. Whether this is just a reflexive act of rage, a demonstration of Israel’s “deterrent capability,” or a strategic attempt to make the Lebanese suffer so much they turn against Hezbollah — and it is probably all three — in the long run, it could be a massive mistake. Countries rarely collapse into stability. The last time Israel tried to rearrange Lebanon’s power structure was when Ariel Sharon invaded it in 1982, launching a disastrous war that further devastated Lebanon and is widely considered in Israel to be one of its greatest debacles.

For all their claims that this is a war against “terrorists,” the Israelis have been relentlessly bombing targets that are totally civilian in nature. Besides the ports, airports, highways and bridges across the country, they have also pounded dairy farms, grain silos and flatbed trucks wherever they can find them — just on the off chance they might be carrying rockets or weapons.

The range of targets deemed “terrorist” by the Israelis becomes abundantly clear on a trip out of Beirut through the Beqaa Valley up to the Roman ruins and town of Baalbek, a combination tourist town and Hezbollah nerve center. Gas stations, industrial buildings, farms have all been hit. Many Lebanese believe that the Israelis are bombing employers of Hezbollah — which is pretty much anyone in the valley — to deny them jobs later.

After cresting the Mount Lebanon range that separates Beqaa from the coast, there’s a panoramic view of the valley and its miles of farmland and small towns stretching out as far as the eye can see. On the far side of the valley looms the Anti-Lebanon Range which separates Lebanon from Syria. Once considered by the West to be as synonymous with terrorism as Afghanistan was and Iraq is today, Beqaa has long ago traded most of its terrorist training camps for vineyards, restaurants and high-end hotels catering to tourists of every stripe. Baalbek once was a base for Iranian Revolutionary Guards in town to train Hezbollah fighters in the 1980s, but today the revolutionaries have been replaced by Arabs in traditional outfits who will take your picture on a camel while you’re on a break from exploring the stunning Roman ruins.

This was Baalbek until last week, when the fighter jets once again returned to Beqaa in search of Hezbollah’s training centers, bunkers and other targets. Hezbollah is centered in south Lebanon, but it was born here in the north Beqaa, where the group could organize and train away from the Israeli occupation of the border areas. And with the yellow and green flags of Hezbollah fluttering from every light post and power line once you get past the Christian town of Zahle, it’s clear that the arrival of the tourists has not driven them out.

Today the valley, normally bustling with tourists, is deadly quiet except for the sound of jet engines and explosions, which throw up great clouds of smoke and dust along various ridgelines. The highway is deserted save for the occasional car driving at breakneck speed to get to the safety of the Christian towns. The U.S. and Israel call this a war on terror and not Islam, but the Lebanese don’t believe them: Shiite areas need to be left quickly and Christian areas get hit a lot less.

As we draw closer to Baalbek, the road gets even more deserted and buildings along the side of the road show significant damage. Gas stations and even a huge dairy farm have been blasted to rubble. Inside the town itself, there are no tourists at the famed ruins and the streets are clear of all but men who are obviously part of Hezbollah.

“You really shouldn’t be around here,” says Abu Ali, a Hezbollah commander carrying boxes out of an empty restaurant. “They are bombing everything today.”

He explains that all the civilians have left town, some for the mountains around Syria. We’re welcome to go and take a look at the refugees, which as the commander he can authorize. “But I really would not go; they are bombing that area all the time. Many civilians are dead and their cars burned. We had the civilians leave Baalbek for the smuggling roads (up in the mountains) but up there they are a target.”

Ali says the Israelis do not bomb here much during the day. He readily admits that the flattened buildings scattered around the area are Hezbollah offices and facilities.

In the town center, at a bakery, the handful of remaining people look exhausted and furious. They are clearly Hezbollah officials, fighters and sympathizers and are more wary of outsiders than the guys in Beirut. When one journalist says he is from Canada, they immediately ask him what city or province he is from, checking to see if he is lying about his nationality. (I am on assignment for the German magazine Stern as a photographer so I let them assume I’m German; if they speak German I explain I’m an Irish freelancer. I do lie a little for access reasons and to preempt the 30-minute lecture about America’s Middle East sins. I’m not worried about the safety issue yet. The Hezbollah leadership knows me and knows I’m American so I try to be honest.)

“No one can bring food into the Beqaa; they plan to starve us,” says one man who does not give his name. “This is the plan to destroy Hezbollah.” All around him, men nod at perhaps the only point on which they would agree with Israeli officials.

The whole place is eerie and seems almost desperate.

But not all civilians have left. Just outside of town the Milhem family, a clan of Sunni Muslim farmers who also have a camel that tourists can photograph, are having lunch and drinking coffee in their lovely garden, surrounded by jasmine and lemon trees. It’s an idyllic scene except for the occasional explosion off in the distance.

Mohammed Milhem, 29, lost a leg to an Israeli bomb when he was 5. A jet fighter dropped a bomb on him and his brother while they were tending sheep. He ruefully recalls that the bomb killed a lot of sheep, a fact that seems almost as important to him in retelling the story as the loss of his leg. He’s a farmer and herder and livestock are important to him.

Mohammed is fairly calm about the whole thing and expresses less hatred for Israel than a stoic expectation that they will keep attacking — as, in his experience, they have always done.

“There is fear in war and everyone here only has one thing in their mind, ‘They have arrived,’” he says. “But this time, they are very precise at hitting the Hezbollah targets. I live here in Beqaa and don’t know anything about Hezbollah, where they live or train, but the Israelis do. It’s impressive.”

He says that most families have fled to the safety of Christian villages up in the hills or are tending their fields and livestock during the day and sleeping in caves at night.

He’s convinced that Israel wants war on Islam or Lebanon because they have been hitting ports and targets in places with no relationship at all to Hezbollah — Christian and Sunni areas that historically have terrible relationships with the group.

Although he is normally not a supporter of Hezbollah, because of Israel’s attack on Lebanon he has emotionally aligned himself with the group. “I won’t align with Israel. I will not turn my back on my land,” Mohammed says.

But he also holds Hezbollah responsible for what has happened and expects them to get results: the release of Lebanese prisoners and the return of Shebaa Farms. Then he says he can live in peace, and even forgive the loss of his leg. But he will not forgive Hezbollah allowing Lebanon to be bombed if it capitulates without gaining something.

“If Hezbollah abides by what the Israelis want then they will lose my support,” he says. “For them to take the soldiers, start this war and all this and then give them back without getting anything, no way. I will not forgive them.”

A strange sense of déjà vu hangs over Lebanon, even for those of us too young to have covered the civil war from 1975 to 1990. I was working in Haret Hreik last week with two other photographers when the Hezbollah guys started yelling that Israeli jets were coming. The previous night, the Israelis had dropped, by my count, at least 18 large bombs into that neighborhood in a three-hour period and much of the place lay in ruins. As we ran for the car through the smoke and mist, I could hear the radio. Radio stations here have reverted to news updates every 15 minutes and we all quieted down in the car so we could hear the latest news from our own neighborhoods, or from the southern cities of Tyre or Sidon. This road hit … that bridge bombed … these civilians killed … that neighborhood devastated … that city attacked. Between these essential broadcasts, the stations have taken to playing the famous Lebanese diva Fayrouz, whose hauntingly beautiful voice, singing in Arabic to Western-style classical music, served as the soundtrack to the lives of the civil war generation.

Just as we hit the car and sped away from the danger, I looked out to the deserted streets, craters and gloomy smoke-filled air and was filled with the strange sense that I had done this before. The bombs exploded just a few minutes after we left, the sound of the explosions mingling with the singer’s yearning voice. After 30 years and so much blood and suffering, the people of Lebanon are back where they started, listening to Fayrouz while Israeli bombs fall. In the Middle East, it seems, history is a nightmare that keeps repeating itself.

On Wednesday, IDF strikes destroyed the bridges connecting south Lebanon to the rest of the country. By nightfall, Israeli fighters had blasted the major highways, essentially sealing off the southern third from the center of the country. Early morning Thursday, warplanes bombed Rafiq Hariri Beirut International Airport, knocking out the runways. Minutes later, an Israeli rocket struck Hezbollah’s television station, al-Manar, wounding one person and sending local media into a frenzy over access to the scene that dispersed only when an IDF fighter screamed overhead and people ran for cover.

And so it continued all day. Bridges used just an hour before were smashed into rubble. Gunboats off the coast fired wildly into Palestinian militant camps. Attack helicopters ignited a fuel depot at the airport, while leaflets rained down upon the residents of the rundown Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods in southern Beirut, warning them to flee or face further airstrikes aimed at the Hezbollah leadership. The IDF also announced a total blockade of the country by air and sea. Late Thursday night it bombed the only major route out of Lebanon, the road to Damascus. In all, Israeli airstrikes were reported to have killed at least 55 civilians.

Israeli generals have said they want to deal Hezbollah a devastating blow and permanently clear the group away from Israel’s northern border. Whether they can achieve this is uncertain. While there is no way the militant group can stand up to this kind of aerial assault, Hezbollah is a much more formidable adversary than the Palestinians militants in Gaza. The Islamic Resistance of Lebanon, as Hezbollah prefers to be called, is probably the most competent organization in the entire Arab Middle East. No other Arab army has defeated the mighty IDF, one of the most powerful armies in the world, as Hezbollah did in 2000 when it drove it out of south Lebanon. Syria has been whipped half a dozen times at Israeli hands. Jordan has lost so much land and earned so many refugees that it chose to anger the entire rest of the Arab world (and two-thirds of its population) and sue for a long-term peace deal just to avoid future losses. And Egypt? The most powerful and populous state in the Arab world doesn’t even want Gaza back, let alone have another go at the IDF.

Hezbollah remains the only military force that the Israelis really respect, based on its top-notch training and equipment supplied by Iran, and a brand of Shiite Islam that lends both extreme discipline and total fearlessness. Hezbollah boasts thousands of fighters, many battle-hardened, backed by a significant number of artillery pieces and rockets. It constitutes no threat to invade and hold northern Israel. But the daring and successful operation it pulled off on Wednesday shows that it cannot be taken lightly. Ambushing an IDF Humvee patrol, Hezbollah forces killed three Israeli soldiers and seized two more. When the Israelis sent tanks across the border in pursuit, a powerful cache of buried explosives destroyed one tank, killing its four-man crew. And in the face of massive air, artillery and naval strikes against Lebanese infrastructure and military targets, Hezbollah has managed to fire hundreds of rockets and artillery shells into northern Israel; late on Thursday, rockets were reported to have struck the major Israeli city of Haifa. Even the U.S. Navy reportedly pulled its ships out of Haifa’s ports.

On Wednesday, Hezbollah leader Sayeed Hassan Nasrallah proclaimed that his group had kidnapped the soldiers and set a major prisoner swap as the condition of their release.

Israel rejected any negotiations and launched massive retaliatory strikes. “The Lebanese government needs to understand that there is a price for its inaction. They need to understand that if they are not able to deal with terror, we will have no choice but to fight with them,” IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Thursday.

But while Israel’s actions could be defended as a deterrent against an act of aggression, they also amount to the collective punishment of the Lebanese society and government, which have little say over Hezbollah’s activities.

The situation puts the Lebanese government and military in an extremely tough position. The government simply cannot control Hezbollah. It cannot take it on politically because of its support among Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim population, in a country where almost everyone still votes for their religion’s candidate regardless of merit. Nor can the well-trained but tiny and underequipped Lebanese army take on the Shiite militia.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has had to walk a political tightrope over Hezbollah’s close relationship with Syria. Now, Hezbollah’s actions and the Israeli response have put him in an almost surreal position. A favorite of the Bush administration for throwing out the Syrian military occupation last year in the wake of Rafiq Hariri’s murder (widely believed by Syrian agents), Lebanon’s new government has been gently pushing Hezbollah into political dialogue, with the goal of disarming the group or integrating it into the Lebanese army. But now Siniora’s government faces wanton destruction at the hands of America’s other favorite Middle East country, which is demanding two kidnapped soldiers that Siniora simply cannot deliver.

Most of the country’s non-Shiites distrust Hezbollah for remaining an armed group outside government control, and join the Shiites in disliking Israel for its policies in occupied Palestine and its bloody history in Lebanon. The past two days are forcing people to choose sides, but most are refusing to do so. They appear to see this as a fight between two sworn enemies with a long history that has little to do with them directly.

So far the Lebanese seem to be choosing to hoard bottled water and stay quiet. It’s hard to imagine them picking either side, even as they watch their highways, airports and villages being bombed, while hordes of Arab tourists flee to Damascus, taking with them the tourism money Lebanon counts on to survive.

But down in the south, in a village called al-Dweir, amid Hezbollah’s strongest supporters, the case is clear-cut. They regard Hezbollah as having mounted a military operation against a military target — and see civilians paying the price.

At about 4 a.m. Thursday morning, Israeli warplanes bombed the home of Sayeed Adel Akkash, a Shiite cleric probably associated with Hezbollah. The bomb flattened the home and killed Akkash, his wife and their 10 children, leaving only three bodies identifiable as such and a surprisingly small pile of body parts.

Dr. Yousef Akkash is a French-educated surgeon and Adel’s brother. It is his job to oversee the funeral, as his father is too distraught to do so. He enters the basement of a mosque near the family home and joins two doctors whose job it is to separate out body parts and try to figure out which part should go in which grave. It’s extremely messy. Finally, with a cleric’s approval, they decide to put the 12 mangled corpses into six graves.

Dr. Adel claims to not know if his brother really was a Hezbollah official but says he hopes it’s true, “so there can be some reason behind this tragedy.”

He’s upset and angry but can still talk of peace with the people who did this. “All people want peace,” he tells me in English. “As do the people of Lebanon, but we need justice amid this occupation. We want peace and justice for all people, Muslim and Christian, Arab and Jew.”

But in the makeshift morgue he holds up part of a baby’s body and asks the recoiling reporters to come closer.

“Come see the arms and weapons my brother had,” he says, holding up a tiny arm. “Here is your ‘terrorist.’”

Denials aside, this is clearly a Hezbollah funeral, as shown by the flags all around it and the arrival of a bunch of men who are clearly part of the group. And the funeral is being watched. Even as we can hear Hezbollah rockets being fired at Israel just a few miles away, the constant buzz of a unmanned surveillance drone can be heard. And from time to time, an IDF fighter roars overhead.

A man named Tahir Ahmed asks me where I am from. When I tell him, without a trace of hostility he asks me to “tell the American people we are thankful for your country because it gives weapons to Israel that are used to kill our children.”

I begin to talk to Tahir Ahmed about this statement, and he elaborates. “We distinguish between your people and your government. But if your country did not cover Israel, then Israel could not do these things. There is a big error in the mentality of the American people. Because of movies and Hollywood, you think like cowboys. There is a good guy and a bad guy. And you see the Arab as the bad guy and the Jew as a good guy. It is naive to see only good and bad in the world.”

“If Hezbollah kidnapped two soldiers, this is a matter between two military groups. Why do they involve children? She was not attacking Tel Aviv, he says of Akkash’s 6-month-old daughter, killed in the strike. “She was sleeping with her family. I hope the American people think of a 6-month-old-girl killed with an American fighter, flown by an Israeli pilot. If she was with a soldier at the front, then these things happen. But she was asleep with her family.”

Late Thursday, Israeli officials said they were not ruling out a ground invasion. For many Lebanese, caught once again in a fight not of their making, an old and terrible history seems to be repeating itself.

The rest of the details are murky. Afghan witnesses claim the U.S. soldiers opened fire on the crowd and killed half a dozen or more people. Other reports claim it was the Afghan police and Afghan National Army that did the firing into the crowd. But it doesn’t matter, because within one hour, large crowds of angry Afghan youth — reportedly egged on by various enemies of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai — rampaged through Kabul, looting shops, attacking Western-affiliated companies and aid agencies and attempting to ransack nice hotels frequented by Westerners.

The riots went on for more than seven hours. Armed gangs of looters destroyed humanitarian compounds and laid siege to the Interior Ministry itself. The much-touted Afghan security forces were ineffectual, and the 9,000 NATO peacekeeping troops in Kabul never left their compounds. Scores of people were killed. The official total is 17 dead but literally no one believes that. Eyewitnesses said there were more than 10 killed in front of one mobile phone company compound, whose security detail of former British Special Forces men refused to abandon their building and opened fire, eventually winning a four-hour gun battle against the looters. Informed Afghan security sources put the total dead at close to 100 people.

It was the worst single day of violence in Kabul since the fall of the Taliban regime over four years ago, and it revealed how fragile the tolerance for the American, NATO and international community presence in Afghanistan actually is for the people of this impoverished, violence-plagued and deeply divided country.

Violence in Afghanistan has recently spiked, mainly in the south, as the remnants of the Taliban have been increasingly successful in their insurgency. In the past three weeks, the country has seen some of the worst fighting since the fall of the Taliban. Since May, more than 500 people have been killed, many of them suspected insurgents. U.S. Ambassador Ronald Neumann blamed much of the violence on drug mafias fighting the Kabul government’s U.S.-backed opium eradication campaign. The situation has grown so grave that Karzai has taken the risky step of using tribesmen in the south to fight the Taliban.

But the rioters weren’t Taliban or their supporters. The men burning the compound of CARE International, chasing Western journalists while screaming “skin the infidels,” were also waving posters of murdered Northern Alliance commander Shah Ahmed Massoud. The rioters were the supporters of the very groups that helped the Americans defeat the Taliban. These are our friends, who fought alongside us in 2001 and 2002 and welcomed the U.S. military as heroic allies.

What happened? Afghans complain it’s the same thing that always seems to happen in Afghanistan: The West’s failure to deliver on its big promises. Bush’s invasion of Iraq diverted badly needed troops, materiel and money from Afghanistan. Now the situation is deteriorating, and the U.S. is stretched too thin to do anything about it.

Mohammed Fahim Dashty, who runs the English language Kabul Weekly newspaper, remains close to his Northern Alliance comrades — he was Massoud’s press aide and lost an eye when two al-Qaida operatives posing as Arab journalists blew themselves up on Sept. 9, 2001, killing Massoud. He says the people of the country have become enraged after seeing too little improvement and too much occupation.

“Four years ago there were big wishes, big hopes for quick changes in their miserable lives for the Afghan people,” he says. “But it didn’t happen and in some ways it’s worse than under the Taliban because day by day the security situation worsens.”

Afghans are angry not only with the international community — the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, non-governmental aid groups, and the huge corporations that provide consultants and experts to the reconstruction effort — but with the increasingly unpopular Karzai. The president plays politics by exploiting his close ties to the American and international donors who have dumped billions into the country the past four years.

“Whatever the president is doing, he says he has the backing of the international community,” Dashty says. “And the people are still poor. They have nothing to eat at lunch and dinner but see their aid money being spent by foreigners in the latest model cars, getting high salaries and living in nice buildings. This is the only visible benefit, seeing these people living well.”

Karzai also uses the international community as a scapegoat for his own unpopular policies. Recently, he refused to grant a $6 a month salary increase to Afghanistan’s 400,000-plus civil servants. The annual cost of the increase would have been $60 million.

“When asked why he refused this raise, Karzai says to the people, ‘Because the donors refused to increase your salary,’” Dashty says, thus fueling the rage on the street toward both the president and the international community.

“When [the Americans] came, the reasons they gave were to help Afghanistan rebuild and reconstruct the economy,” he adds. “But is there a real plan to do this? The people don’t know.”

Dr. Ramazan Bashar Dost, a member of the new Parliament representing Kabul, sits in the same tent in Shar-E-Now Park he campaigned from on an anti-NGO platform. Once elected, he refused the trappings of power, like an office or car, and kept the tent. The former planning minister famously lost his job almost two years ago when he ordered all international NGOs shut down, accusing them of wasting huge amounts of aid money.

“The situation for the international community was bad before,” he says, referring to a conversation we had last September. “But now it is dangerous — and is likely to damage both the Afghan state and the credibility of the international community.”

A big part of the problem is the collapsing security situation in the south and east of the country, where the ethnic Pashtun regions have seen a rise in the number and boldness of Taliban attacks.

“Two weeks ago in Uruzgan Province, the Taliban took over an entire district and held it for three days,” Dost says. “The Afghan people don’t understand how Karzai and the power of America and NATO cannot control such a small group like the Taliban.

“You could see it two weeks ago in Kabul,” he added. “No police, no soldiers in Kabul. The people targeted hotels, TV and international community symbols because the majority of the Afghan people think they are responsible for the problems.”

Dost says the high price of the contractors and NGOs, and their shoddy work, anger the people who remain poor despite hearing about the billions spent to help them. “The problem is that the NGOs work within the system of corruption that plagues Afghanistan,” he says. “They pay the bribes to the officials and even to Western contractors. So people see them as part of the same system as the corrupt government. Everyone plays a part in the problem.”

On the other side of town, far from the contractor-funded hotels and restaurants that serve alcohol and pork in this strictly Muslim country to aid workers and reconstruction experts, a family mourns their dead son.

Abdul Jamil Molowizad, 18, was not a looter; he was a policeman on his day off when the American truck hit the market where he was buying spare car parts. He ran to the scene only to be struck in the face by a machine gun bullet his family says was definitely fired by panicked American forces.

His father, Abdul Qadim, is not a Taliban or a religious zealot; he’s an official in the police department at the Ministry of Interior. A company man to the end, he continues to work alongside the Americans whose troops killed his son. He and his family are Tajiks, and fought against the Taliban.

It’s dusk at his home on the outer edges of Kabul and he’s really too sad to talk. But his brother Abdul Wahid, a government lawyer, is furious and does most of the talking.

“We see the foreign forces as here for occupation,” he says. “People were throwing stones when they saw dead civilians. They knew it was no accident; the Americans just don’t care for the Afghan people or Afghan beliefs.”

Abdul Wahid and his brother agree that, in Walid’s words, the rioting was “people using the situation to take advantage for politics or looting and did much damage to the city.” But “the idea of troops being here is not for the Afghans, it is for both Karzai and Bush.

“There has been no improvement in security, no improvement in the economy and a lot of the people who returned to Afghanistan [from abroad] are returning to Pakistan or Iran because the situation is so bad,” Abdul Wahid says. “The people are fed up with foreign workers. These aid organizations and the troops they work with are just seen as occupiers now. These people do nothing but make money and create problems for us.”

Dashty says that this impatience is not the result of unrealistic expectations by the Afghans about what can be accomplished. As I list the number of problems the country has and that any reconstruction effort faces — complete lack of infrastructure, an impoverished and illiterate population, disease, no roads and a nasty insurgency to the south and east — he nods and agrees. “But we are not asking for miracles, only a plan. If the poorest people in Afghanistan — take Ghowr Province - hear Kabul is improving, they won’t expect a good life but they’ll have hope. When they hear Kabul is not improved in security or economy from the Taliban they will give up hope, because if you can’t improve here…”

According to one Afghan intelligence official so highly placed he won’t even meet with me, but insists that questions be posed through a mutual friend, Afghanistan now faces a worst-case scenario no one could even imagine a year ago. In response to the question, “What keeps you awake at night about the current situation?” he answers that Karzai could become so weak that he invites more and more Taliban elements into the government and sparks a civil war with the Tajiks. The other scenario is that devout Tajiks, who would never work with the Taliban, join with Guliban Hekmaytar, the one-time Taliban enemy who has become a fierce opponent of the U.S. occupation. Hekmaytar recently aligned his group, Hizb al-Islami, with his former Taliban foes, and called for a revolt against U.S. forces and Karzai’s “puppet government.”

Hekmaytar, who led the CIA’s most favored group of fighters in the anti-Soviet jihad, has strong ties to both Pashtun and Tajik religious groups. And people are afraid Tajiks who would never join the Taliban will fight alongside him.

These are all rumors. But just one year ago the rumors were a lot less scary, which shows that the situation is deteriorating.

My friend Naqib put it bluntly. “I was going to bring my family from Peshawar [in Pakistan] but now I will not. It’s not safe. And you should work here as much as you can because in six months you won’t be able to go or do anything here [as a Western journalist].”