People plead for water and electricity

The artillery shells left yawning holes; rockets and small arms fire etched a more delicate filigree in the huge bread factory that once was a monument to Afghan industry.

In the 1970s, all six blocks of the Silo bakery - a Soviet-style feat of engineering that is by far the largest industrial complex in Kabul - shuddered and hummed with activity 24 hours a day. Nearly 2,000 workers, including many women, milled and stored grain, and stoked the ovens that turned out 120,000 naan a day, feeding the interior and defence ministries as well as supplying bakery outlets.

Now, 10 of the 13 massive ovens are cold, crickets chirp from their nests in broken-down machinery and the daily output of naan - the elongated flat bread that is a staple of the Afghan diet - is fewer than 10,000. The factory employs about 200 people.

"It was good working here. We had good facilities, all the equipment we needed. It was really organised," said Abdur Rehman, who has worked at Silo for 25 years. "I feel sad looking at all the machines sitting idle, but I also feel optimistic that with our new government the economy will change for the better."

Like many people in Afghanistan, Mr Rehman has fixed his hopes on the Tokyo conference on reconstructing Afghanistan.

The bread factory, which is owned by the industry ministry, has recalled 1,260 employees - even though there is no work for them. The manager, Mohammad Jan, says he is confident that the interim government will give him the money to repair the destruction caused during the early 1990s when the Silo factory was on the frontline between warring mojahedin factions.

"The government has promised us that it will do repairs all over," Mr Jan said. "They are going to buy us new equipment and our engineers will repair the machinery."

But it is not that simple. Even if donors do produce the billions required for rebuilding the country in the months and years ahead, diplomats are unsure about the ability of Afghanistan's bankrupt government ministries to absorb the cash, and distribute it where it is needed.

Before vanishing from Kabul, the Taliban carried off the last $7m (£5m) from the government coffers in the Afghan central bank. Ministers in the interim administration arrived to offices that had been stripped bare, with the winter winds gusting through shattered windows. Many say they have no idea where to begin rebuilding.

Although the factory has a guaranteed electricity supply, ordinary people live without power or sanitation systems. In most neighbourhoods of Kabul, electricity is rationed in four-hour stints, on alternate days.

Others have never had electricity, or running water, especially the refugees living in the hills overlooking the capital.

On most mornings, the women of the hills clamber down to the Kabul river to scrub their clothes in the puddles that are all that remain of the city's main waterway after four years of drought.

"This government has to give us water and electricity," said Zakiya, dragging her blue burka through the water. "Without those two things, we really don't have a life."

In Kabul's Wazir Akbar Khan hospital, the city's largest, surgeon Salim Tawana counts on his fingers the areas of shortage: gloves, sutures, bandages, medicine, larger equipment - and doctors.

The hospital lost a third of its medical staff when the Taliban seized power in Kabul in 1996. Some emigrated and women professionals were banned from working. Those doctors who had graduated with gold medals or other honours from Russian universities - a symbol of communist leanings in the Taliban interpretation - were sacked.

The picture is equally bleak in education where at the best of times during the reign of King Zahir Shah in the 1970s only 15% of Afghan children had access to schools. After years of war, that slid to 5%, according to the interim education minister, Rasul Amin.

Surrounded by such urgent need, the interim government has focused on five priorities for reconstruction. These start with paying back wages to some 227,000 civil servants and police who have not received their salaries for six months. Without doing so, Afghan officials say, the government cannot provide the security people crave, or the bureaucracy to carry out its reconstruction plans.