It's a strange, strange world you live in, President Karzai.

Afghanistan's schools for girls have reopened; construction finally has begun on a key road linking your devastated country; and the capital Kabul is humming with new restaurants and building activity. Your coming to power nearly two years ago brought with it hope for the future. That's good news.

Yet your regional governments still operate armies of their own. They often treat women not unlike the repressive Taliban did. And at roadblocks and with other extortive ploys they grab hundreds of millions of dollars in what they call taxes and customs -- almost none of which is given to the federal government -- while you ask the world for desperately needed reconstruction money. An assortment of thugs affiliated with these regional warlords and with members of your own government, including Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim, terrorize the local population. They demand bribes, arresting and harassing people with impunity, until ordinary Afghans are tempted to think of the law-and-order Taliban days as the "good old days." The hope is fading. That's bad news.

In Kabul, hundreds of yellow taxis careen down rocket-rutted roads, their horns honking, alongside the big four-wheel-drive vehicles of international aid workers and government officials. Restaurants -- Thai, Italian, Chinese, Indian, German -- are flourishing, although most cater to foreigners or to Afghans accompanied by foreigners. Several serve alcohol -- some discreetly in chipped teapots and others openly, in wine bottles on the table (although high security walls surround most of these establishments). Imported wines are cheaper in Kabul than most anywhere else in the world because, as restaurateurs like to tell you, there are no taxes.

At the same time, very few laws are being enforced. Someone in your own administration -- an American Afghan who returned to help rebuild a newly freed homeland -- told me a typical story that illustrates the lawlessness: "Farid returned from America and went to his former family home, near Chicken Street, in the heart of the city. The new owner, aligned to the defense minister, answered the door and Farid told him that the property was his family home, which he had fled during the Soviet occupation, and he had ownership papers to prove it. The new occupant politely asked Farid to wait for a minute at the door. He returned with a gun, shot Farid in the head, and closed the door. Farid's wife returned quickly to the U.S., where she remains."

This is a scenario endlessly repeated, although not always with a fatal outcome. Members of a Diaspora on which the hopes of rebuilding your country hinge return to Afghanistan only to find that their property -- like the right to live free of fear -- has been appropriated by powerful people like Mr. Fahim and his friends. Even talking can be dangerous, they say. As a former Afghan consultant to a U.S. state government told me: "The corruption is from the cabinet ministers right on down. One cabinet minister has established three Afghan charities, collecting money and doing nothing."

These are the men -- most of them from the so-called Northern Alliance -- who, it is said, are the inheritors of much because they defeated the Taliban. But the regime in fact collapsed because of the U.S.-led coalition. There was no ground war to speak of. Coalition planes pounded Taliban front lines. The Taliban fled. The Northern Alliance were handed power and they in turn are again giving strength to Islamic hard-liners. This is not only because of the lawlessness they are breeding but also because some within their ranks, such as the former Deputy Prime Minister Abdur Rasoul Sayyaf and former President Burhanuddin Rabbani are not Western-friendly. Like many in your government, Mr. Karzai, they are working hard to undermine you.

Yours is not an easy job. You have many jealous enemies and even Afghanistan's friends in the West have made your job more difficult -- sometimes championing and strengthening the worst of the commanders.

Yet this is the hand Afghanistan has been dealt, and it is your responsibility as president to show leadership and start strengthening the rule of law in which you believe. Although yours is not an easy task, the lack of action on many fronts signals weakness to your enemies.

You approved changes to your defense ministry that Afghans know don't go far enough to check the thugs there. You fired your governor of Kandahar Province because of incompetence and corruption, and then put him in your cabinet. You wisely removed the military corps command from Herat Gov. Ismail Khan, but when a bomb went off at the home of his replacement, sending him fleeing back to Kabul, you did not intervene. You banned logging, yet the roads from lumber-rich eastern Afghanistan are bumper-to-bumper with 16-wheelers hauling lumber -- ignoring your order and paying a fortune in bribes to commanders and government officials who were appointed by your government and are working with your U.S. allies.

The building of a national army has been undermined by your defense ministry -- which is dominated by members of one group, Tajiks, and which still holds massive stockpiles of weapons in the Panjshir valley. Meanwhile, a chance to reintegrate the ethnic Pashtuns of the south and east (of which you are one) into the national fabric and government after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 has been squandered.

True, your neighbors are not making your job any easier. Pakistan, where religious extremists control regions that border Afghanistan, has allowed Taliban holdouts to operate freely, stage attacks on your government and recruit openly. Iran has sent revolutionary guards into western and central Afghanistan to destabilize it, and there are credible reports that Tehran has tried to arrange meetings between senior members of your government and renegade rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. India has used its good will with the Northern Alliance to make its traditional enemy, Pakistan, nervous by heavily restaffing its consulates in eastern Afghanistan and offering to build a dam in northeastern Afghanistan right on the border with Pakistan.

As is often said: Rebuilding a country after 23 years of war is no easy job. But it can't happen if you don't lay a solid foundation. Right now the foundation seems to be setting up your poor country for a fall the world will blame on Afghans.

You have tough jobs ahead, yet if you take them on, you will not be alone. You don't have to sit still while some of your own government ministers threaten you with war -- not when your biggest ally is the world's leading military power. It's also time for you to talk tough with Afghanistan's U.S. and coalition allies. Tell them that while you do your part, they must renew their commitment as well.

For instance, there are barely 11,000 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, which is larger than Iraq. The aid offered to Afghanistan over five years is $5 billion -- only slightly more than the $4 billion-plus in aid that goes to Sri Lanka and not a fifth of what was given to Kosovo. Yet your country was the first battlefield in the war on terror.

Afghanistan has made progress. But if the prosperous and strong country you envision is to become a reality, then tough decisions and hard work lie ahead, both for you and for Afghanistan's allies.

Ms. Gannon, Associated Press bureau chief in Pakistan, is currently the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. She has spent much of her time since 1988 working in Afghanistan.