BADAM ALI, AFGHANISTAN -- After 22 years of war, Merza Khan thought he finally had found shelter. The impoverished refugee farmer had fled the front lines and sought haven in a village a few kilometres away, where he seemed safe from Taliban attacks.

But less than a month later, as the U.S. military and its allies in Afghanistan's Northern Alliance prepared to deal a final blow to the Taliban regime, Merza Khan's life was shattered by a grotesque twist of fate. An errant bomb from a U.S. warplane killed his wife, destroyed his mud-brick house and badly injured his mother and two children. Although he escaped the blast, the trauma left him a wreck, his hands shaking uncontrollably.

Ten months later, he needs help with simple tasks such as eating and walking. He is so poor that he cannot afford medical treatment. He never got a penny of compensation from the United States, or a letter of apology. Yet astonishingly, he remains a fervent supporter of what the U.S. military did in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, and what it continues to do.

"If it wasn't for the United States, who could have gotten rid of the Taliban?" he asks, his brown eyes solemn as he crouches on the cheap plastic sheet that serves as his carpet. The plastic, scarred by shrapnel, is one of the few things he salvages from his bombed house.

The room in his cousin's house, where Mr. Khan lives, is swarming with flies. The village is peaceful now, but many of its pastures and mud houses are in ruins. The bleak fields are dotted with the graves of war victims, marked by the green flags of Muslim martyrdom. Its bazaar was destroyed by the war, so townspeople must travel for hours by donkey to buy food.

"I lost my wife; I lost my home; I lost everything I had," Mr. Khan says. "But it was worth the sacrifice, because the Taliban have been swept away."

A year after the terrorist attacks that brought the Taliban's downfall, the poverty and suffering have not disappeared. Ethnic conflict and violence have persisted. On the Shomali Plains, where the Northern Alliance staged its final assault on Kabul, subsistence farmers such as Mr. Khan still wonder whether their future will ever brighten.

The Soviet invasion of 1979 was followed by a bloody guerrilla struggle in the 1980s and factional strife in the 1990s, which led to a brutal military takeover by the Taliban's Islamic zealots. Now, after so much war, the farmers of Badam Ali are willing to accept any sort of peace -- even at the cost of their loved ones' lives.

"We don't have any money, and life is very difficult, but the most important thing is that the Taliban are gone and we are still alive," says Mr. Khan's cousin, Sayid Alam, a former soldier who lost his leg in a battle against the Taliban.

This desperate yearning for stability has created a breathing space for the new government in Kabul. With the worst of the bloodshed apparently over, most Afghans have been willing to tolerate the failures and excesses of the new regime: its authoritarian and fundamentalist impulses, its ethnic discrimination, the intimidation of women, the lingering corruption and the violent feuding among warlords.

Slowly, however, many Afghans are growing disillusioned with a government that enjoys the open backing of Washington and the UN but has been unable to do much for their basic needs.

Two hours across a dusty plain from Badam Ali, in the former front-line town of Jabal Saraj, a 38-year-old math teacher named Mohammed Asef Ayobi acknowledges that the war's end has brought many benefits. There is less crime, he says, along with lower food prices, quicker access to Kabul and less military tension. But then again, his small monthly salary of $60 has not been paid for six months, and he thinks government corruption is the reason.

"Those who bribe the government, they get paid," he says. "It's almost impossible for teachers to bribe anyone, because we can't afford it, so we don't get paid."

There have been other obstacles, many of them monumental, to the rebuilding efforts that come with peace. To the west of Jabal Saraj, in the shadow of mountains that served as the war's last front line, the village of Qalazi seems to face new troubles at every turn. Most of its houses were abandoned during the war, and hundreds of villagers fled to Pakistan. But when refugees trickled back this year, they found their village so parched that it was impossible to grow crops. They cannot rebuild their homes because there isn't enough water to make mud bricks. Just to get a few litres of drinking water, they must walk two hours to another village.

Now, many farmers are planning to give up and migrate again, returning to their old jobs as labourers in Pakistan for $4 or $5 a day.

The water shortage, caused by four years of drought, is heightening the ethnic tension that has plagued this country for decades. Qalazi is an ethnic-Pashtun village, but its main water source is a nearby village of ethnic Tajiks where there is plenty of water. The people of Qalazi accuse the Tajiks of refusing to open their dam to send water their way, but the Tajiks say they must share their water with 22 other villages and don't have enough for Qalazi.

"Against the Taliban, in the mujahedeen, we were all brothers, Pashtun and Tajik, fighting on the same side," says Mohammed Marshal, a Qalazi villager. "Now there is no friendship between us. This is very bad."

The ethnic divisions have the potential to tear Afghanistan apart. The Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group, with almost half the population (although there has not been a proper census in more than a generation). Yet they have been largely excluded from key posts in the new military and security apparatus, because the Taliban was dominated by Pashtuns.

Those who have assumed other prominent positions have faced still graver threats. Two of the best-known Pashtun cabinet ministers, including vice-president Haji Abdul Qadir, were assassinated this year in broad daylight in Kabul. Their killers have not been arrested. Similar threats to President Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, led him to request a personal bodyguard of U.S. Special Forces soldiers.

Many ordinary Pashtuns feel that Kabul has become an occupied city, controlled by Tajiks, most notably the disciplined fighters of the Panjshir Valley who now make up virtually all of the city's police force. In northern Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Pashtuns have fled to camps in other parts of the country for fear of local warlords who have allowed Pashtuns to be looted, raped, beaten and, in many reported cases, killed.

"The whole government is controlled by Panjshiris, and any Pashtun leader who refuses to obey them will be killed, like Qadir was killed," says Nor Muhammad, a 40-year-old Pashtun brickmaker from a province near Kabul.

"All the Pashtuns believe that Qadir was killed by Panjshiris because he was Pashtun. Only three or four people at the top of the government are Pashtuns, and this is only because of American pressure. As soon as the United States is gone, they will be removed."

The brickmaker was never a supporter of the Taliban, but he believes there was more security and fairness for Pashtuns under the Taliban than there is today. "If this continues, maybe some of the Pashtuns will begin to struggle against the government, and this could become a military struggle," he warns.

Even at the highest levels of the government, there are deep worries about the ethnic feuding. Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the most senior members of the new cabinet said in an interview that Pashtuns "feel that they're not as strongly represented as they should be -- and, more importantly, that the whole government is dominated by one small valley. Everyone feels this. I hope it will not cause any major instability, but the tensions are there. I have a sense that people are starting to get impatient."

Although Mr. Karzai was given the presidency, the most powerful man in the new government is Mohammed Fahim, the shadowy Defence Minister from the Panjshir Valley, who has accumulated vast influence in the new regime. A former boss of the Afghan secret police in the early 1990s, he was promoted to head the Northern Alliance's military command after last year's assassination of fabled guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Masood. (It is widely believed the assassination, on Sept. 9, was ordered by Osama bin Laden in an effort to regain favour with his Taliban hosts before the terrorist attacks.)

This year, Mr. Fahim promoted himself to the rank of marshal, assuming command over the entire Afghan military and also acquiring the title of Vice-President. He has consolidated his power by filling the upper ranks of the military and secret police with fellow Panjshiris.

Mr. Fahim is widely suspected of involvement in the Qadir assassination because the vice-president was under military guard when he was shot. It was only after the assassination that Mr. Karzai got rid of his own Afghan military guards and replaced them with Americans.

A month earlier, in June, when the country held its loya jirga (grand council) to select a new government, Mr. Fahim insulted the husband of the only woman candidate for president, saying she should quit because her candidacy was not Islamic. According to some reports, he also threatened to use military power to reverse the council's outcome if he disapproved.

"Fahim was rewarded for his bullying with the deputy presidency," the International Crisis Group said in a report this summer. "His brazenness, and the apparent acquiescence of the U.S. and the UN, has made President Karzai look weak."

The report said Afghanistan continues to be ruled by a "Kalashnikov culture" that relies on "force and intimidation." Other human-rights groups have reported that women candidates were subjected to threats and intimidation tactics by armed factions and Islamic fundamentalists when they sought election to the loya jirga.

Mr. Fahim's secret police, known officially as the National Security Directorate, has emerged as one of his key levels of power. First created by the KGB after the Soviet invasion, the secret police became notorious for torture and repression. Today, they remain a powerful network of about 30,000 agents and informers, claiming responsibility for security in most regions.

Shah Mohammed Mirzad, the owner of three bookstores in Kabul, felt the secret police's wrath when he gave a television interview in which he suggested that Mr. Masood had removed valuable items from Kabul's National Museum in the early 1990s and taken them to his stronghold in the Panjshir Valley. After the interview was broadcast on BBC television last winter, intelligence agents called him down to their Kabul headquarters for three separate all-day interrogation sessions. (He defended himself by saying that Mr. Masood took the items only to "protect" them.)

The power struggles in Kabul, the ethnic clashes in the countryside, the corruption, drought and endless minefields -- the troubles that still haunt Afghanistan have not deterred 1.6 million refugees from returning to the ruins of war from their squalid camps and temporary homes in Pakistan and Iran.

On a rocky hillside on the edge of Kabul, Raz Mohammed and his brother Zalmai are building a mud-brick house above a vast cemetery. After living for years in Iran, they returned a few weeks ago to their small farm on the Shomali Plain, only to discover scorched earth and wrecked buildings. All that was left of their garden, once blossoming with cherry and plum trees, was a single fig tree. It was half dead.

The brothers drifted back to Kabul, but unable to afford rents of about $45 a month for an apartment, they are squatting illegally on the bleak hillside and finishing a two-room house for themselves, their wives and six children.

"We have to bring our family here next week, whether it's finished or not," Zalmai says as he mixes the mud chinking for his walls. "If we can't afford a roof, we'll just put a plastic sheet over it."

"Life is better now, but only God knows what will happen in the future," Raz says. "This country has been war-stricken for 23 years and we've seen brief periods of peace before. Nobody can predict whether there will be war again."

Merza Khan, the man who lost his wife and house to a U.S. bomb, has also been on the move -- back to his home village of Badam Ali, on what used to be the front line. His wife never saw the day when it was safe to go back. It was too dangerous to bury her under Taliban bombardment at Badam Ali, so she was buried in the village where they had sought shelter.

"I cried for months," Mr. Khan says. "I asked myself, what is left? Why am I alive? I had nothing left, not even a bite of food or some clothes. It was my fellow villagers who helped me. They took me in."

His wife, Kokugol, was sewing a wedding suit for his brother when the bomb hit. It destroyed all of the clothes and food for the wedding. The ceremony, scheduled for three days later, was cancelled and has still not been held.

Every week or two, the villagers put Mr. Khan on a donkey and lead him to his wife's grave. He cries and shouts for a while, and then they take him back to Badam Ali, where he dreams that one day the United States will send someone to take him abroad for the medical care that he needs. He would even move to the country that has brought a form of peace to his homeland, and so much loss to his life. He does not seem to mind the irony.

"Please, take me out of here," he whispers to a visitor.

"Take me to a foreign country. Please. Please."

Beyond Ground Zero

A year after 9/11, our correspondents visit five points around the world still affected by the aftershocks.

Sept. 2: Afghanistan -- How the killing fields cope with peace

Sept. 3: Pakistan -- Where Jihad University finds new life

Sept. 4: Cairo -- Why Arabs are turning on the West

Sept. 5: Guantanamo Bay -- Where America redefines justice

Sept. 6: The Pentagon -- How the world's superpower plans to strike back