KABUL, Afghanistan – Haji Ghulam Jilani's house wasn't destroyed during the brutal Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. Nor did the blow come during the three-year civil war that followed, or the Taliban's six-year reign of terror.

Jilani's house and the thousands around it were destroyed during a power struggle from 1992 to 1996 among factions of mujahedeen fighters.

Twenty-three years of war in Afghanistan, involving distinct phases and various combatants, have left more than 1 million dead, the nation's roads in ruin and the country salted with as many as 10 million land mines.

The wars have left pockets of devastation across the country, leading to comparisons with Dresden, Germany, after World War II.

In Kabul, 176,000 homes have been destroyed.

Mindful of the degree of ruin, the international community in Tokyo last January pledged $4.5 billion toward the reconstruction of Afghanistan, including $1.8 billion the first year. So far, $600 million has materialized. Complaints over the slow pace of funding have produced bickering among the donor nations, but little else.

Now with Afghanistan generally at peace for the first time in a generation, the task of rebuilding appears daunting. The agenda includes roads, homes, schools, electricity, phones, clean water, solid waste treatment and irrigation. In much of Afghanistan, little can be done safely until the land mines are removed. Six years of drought also complicate rebuilding.

While nations make pledges they might or might not keep, international aid groups draw up ambitious plans that might or might not be funded and businesses maneuver for development contracts, some Afghans have begun rebuilding.

Jilani took a break from supervising the rebuilding of his home in the Kabul neighborhood of Kot Sangi one recent afternoon. He recalled the day two shells destroyed his house.

He rushed home that morning after hearing his house had been hit. He expected to find his children dead in the rubble. But they had survived.

A short time later a second shell hit. Again, nobody was killed, but it was the last straw for Jilani. He packed up his family and took them to Peshawar in neighboring Pakistan, where he made enough money as a jeweler to rebuild the house in Kot Sangi, a once-elite neighborhood near Kabul University.

The rebuilding is being done by hand without electricity. One workman used a blunt object to hammer a scavenged piece of rebar straight enough for a support column. Another man strained to crank a bucket of water from a well dug by hand. The water was used to make sun-dried bricks with dirt snatched by pick ax and shovel from the ruins of the old house.

"Nobody is helping me," Jilani said. "Thank God I have some money. But my neighbor is a teacher and doesn't have a single rupee."

The scene around Jilani's house is one of ruin.

Because of the cost, few others have begun rebuilding.

Across the street from Jilani's house a mosque lies in ruin, a bullet-riddled VW Beetle half buried in the debris.

Kot Sangi's location was its undoing. High, barren mountains provide natural protection for central Kabul, but Kot Sangi and three adjoining neighborhoods were fully exposed to shelling, mortar and rocket fire and they were pounded for four years.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami forces shelled from the northwest; Abdul Rasul Syyaf's Ittehad-e-Islami from the west; Abdul Ali Mazari's Hezb-e-Wahdat from the south; and Burhannudin Rabbani's Jamiat-e-Islami from the northeast, according to former residents.

"The sky was always red with bullets and shells," said Abdul Latif, a 62-year-old who was riding his bike through the ruins of Kot Sangi. His house also had been destroyed. "Shells were constantly exploding around my house. I lived in fear I would die any second."

Another scene of great devastation lies north of Kabul – the once lush, green plain of Shamali. It had been famous for its bounty of diminutive, sweet table grapes, raisins, melons and other produce.

People have been irrigating the plateau for 4,500 years. Surrounded by mountains, the plain could have been compared loosely to California's Central Valley until 23 years ago.

Today, Shamali is a dust bowl with swirling winds generating dust devils. The road north from Kabul cuts through the heart of the plain, revealing destroyed orchards and vineyards.

The landscape is littered with the debris of successive wars – wrecked Soviet tanks, unexploded ordnance and mine fields. But nothing was more devastating than the destruction of the valley's ancient underground irrigation system known as karezes.

The village of Karez takes its name from that system, a series of wells connected underground by hand-dug tunnels. The karezes are designed to tap alluvial water deposits and feed the water above ground to the fields.

Local mujahedeen fighters resisting the Soviet occupation during the 1980s had hidden themselves in the network of karez tunnels, prompting the Soviets to blow up the tunnels with dynamite. A decade later, the Taliban blew up the tunnels for the same reason. Drought and neglect during years of war also have taken a toll.

Palwan Zahir, a village elder, was supervising the distribution of poplar poles delivered by an international aid group on a recent afternoon. He was trying to ensure that the poles, which are used as ceiling beams in mud houses, were distributed fairly among the village's 1,200 families.

Four large karezes, involving scores of wells, had been watering the village's 2,000 acres for more than 500 years.

"The karezes provided a lot of water," Zahir said. "It was so nice and lush and green. And now there is nothing but dust."

Returning after the Taliban was driven off, the villagers have restored two of the four karezes, which provide them enough water to survive and rebuild their destroyed homes, but not enough yet to restore the vineyards and orchards.

Zahir's son Wasim, 37, has 5,000 grapevines that haven't produced a crop since the Taliban took over the country in 1996, he said. There isn't enough water to revive his 60-year-old vines and they are dying, he said.

"These 23 years have been very bad," he said. "Everything has been destroyed."

Abdul Ahmad was rebuilding his house nearby.

"It seems I have spent my whole life in war," he said.

Along the road north from Kabul "de-mining" teams sifted the dirt inch by inch for land mines and unexploded ordnance.

Near the village of Laghmani, a man named Kaka Jan, draped in a bomb-protection jacket and helmet, gently sifted the dirt with a small spade, finding mine fragments but no land mines. A team of four can clear about 18 square yards a day.

Not far from where Jan was working, a brown plastic object was half exposed in the dirt and weeds. It's a mine, said Jan's supervisor, Said Mukhtar.

Jan and Mukhtar are part of a huge nationwide mine-clearing effort that has been under way since 1992 and has a long way to go.

"We've been doing this for 12 years, and I don't know how long it will take to clear the whole country," Mukhtar said.

With 4 million to 10 million land mines, Afghanistan has the unhappy distinction of being perhaps the most heavily mined nation in the world. Last fall, the United States added its own cluster bombs to the mix.

Mukhtar carried a notebook with the names of 29 people who have been killed while clearing fields for his company over the past 12 years.

Watching the team that afternoon was a 27-year-old farmer named Shakar. He had special reason to be interested in the progress. A mine in the field they were clearing had killed his father in 1993. About a year and a half ago, Shakar stepped on a land mine while digging a water channel there. He lost his left leg from above the knee.

"We have peace, but the mines are still here," he said.

It is said that five to 10 people a day are killed or maimed by mines in Afghanistan. Mines also have taken a heavy toll on the country's livestock.

Perhaps no road in Afghanistan is in worse condition than the vital stretch between Kabul and Jalalabad, the western-most leg of the fabled Grand Trunk Road. The Grand Trunk Road stretches from Kabul east across the South Asia subcontinent to Calcutta. The leg from Kabul to Jalalabad is crucial for trucks carrying produce and smuggled goods to markets in the bustling Pakistani border city of Peshawar.

The trip from Kabul to the Pakistani border should take less than three hours, but because of the ruinous condition of the road after a decade of heavy use by Soviet tanks, the journey takes eight. At times, the dust is so thick that it is impossible to see other vehicles. In places, the road resembles a downhill slalom course.

Kuchi nomads, with their families and livestock, migrate by foot to lower elevations in the winter and then back up into the mountains for the summer. They can be seen frequently along the road east from Kabul to the border.

The number of Kuchis living in Afghanistan is estimated at 500,000 to 3 million. They and their livestock have suffered greatly due to land mines.

Muhammad Nazir and his family were feeding their camels during a recent hot afternoon, waiting for nightfall so they could continue a nocturnal march from Ghorband in the mountains to Jalalabad on the valley floor. The journey will take two months to complete. Three families totaling 37 people were traveling together. They had seven camels, eight cows and 150 sheep.

Nazir counted the toll of mines on his family: Land mines have taken the lives of his father and four cousins; three other family members have lost legs.