White said security began deteriorating markedly around Jan. 18, when three Afghan men working for Mercy Corps in southern Uruzgan province rounded a bend in their pickup to encounter 10 men wearing black masks.
The men opened fire with Kalashnikov rifles and a machine gun, White said. Bullets barely missed the two engineers and their driver. The men then robbed the workers and left.
"Our considered opinion is these guys were the real McCoy, they were al-Qaida," White said.
Around the same time, Mercy Corps workers in the southern city of Kandahar began seeing more fliers offering bounties on foreigners and advocating jihad, or holy war, against the West.
More recently, Afghan workers for Doctors Without Borders near Pakistan were threatened. "There have been direct threats to them, saying that by working for a Western organization you are at risk," said Brigg Reilley, a Doctors Without Borders program officer in New York.
The organization evacuated its 10 non-Afghan workers from the border area and from Kandahar. It also deactivated its Afghan workers, a step not taken during years of war.
Mercy Corps has pulled workers back to Kabul from rural areas, where they had been supporting villagers rebuilding wells, schools and houses. The organization, which had 23 non-Afghan workers in Kandahar last summer, is down to five. The organization's Afghan work force has dropped from 500 to about 150 in southern Afghanistan.
"For the first time in 16 years, we're having to pull back substantially from an area that we've worked in through five successive governments," White said, "including the Taliban, the mujahedeen and the Soviets."
Mercy Corps and other relief organizations urge the Bush administration to support expanding the international security force, a 4,500-strong unit whose patrols remain confined to Kabul.
"The very insecurity that's happening in Afghanistan," White said, "is exactly how the Taliban was born."
White sees lessons for Iraq, which he thinks may be easier to rebuild because it is a more developed country with potential oil revenues. But relief workers will need security there as well, he said, to distribute aid and to help rebuild.
"It does have to be the concern of fighting forces what comes next," White said. "You can't just fight the war."
