KHOST, Afghanistan (AFP) - At the entrance to the arid Afghan village of Masha, 50-year-old Shawda Khan calls to the visitor: "It is not worth going to see the head of the tribe: I will show you myself that nothing has changed for us since the Taliban." With no clinic and no hospital, the village - like several others in eastern Khost province - has seen no benefit from the roughly $10 billion of aid money Afghanistan has received since the 2001 ouster of the Taliban that ended decades of war.

Not the worst victim of a deadly Taliban-led insurgency, nor a haven of peace, not the richest province, nor the poorest, Khost provides a representative glimpse into the progress of the daunting job of rebuilding Afghanistan.

And it reveals some of the shortcomings that are a symptom, officials say, of aid projects being uncoordinated and unmonitored - an issue that will feature at a January 31-February 1 conference in London between the government and its international partners.

There was once an attempt to do something for Masha, in Gurbaz district on the border with Pakistan.

"The American army gave 2.4 million Afghanis (about $48,000) to a local businessman to come and install a well," says villager Hamid Gul, 60.

"He pocketed the money, giving some to the head of the tribe, but nothing was done," he says.

Other villages have had a little more luck. At nearby Nawai Kot in Jaji district a clinic was renovated a few months ago by a non-government organization called the Swedish Committee.

Inside, the three staff sit among about 50 boxes of medicines they dole out to the roughly 60 people they treat a day.

"Life has improved slightly, but not enough to lower the infant mortality rate, which is about 20 percent in some villages," says pharmacist Gul Mansoor, 40.

But 18-year-old Janad Gul complains: "There is no work and the prices of food and fuel have doubled."

Apart from small projects undertaken as part of the government's National Solidarity Program, reconstruction is "often nonexistent in the villages," says a UN representative in the region.

"This has disappointed Afghans, who were expecting so much," he says.

In the capital, also called Khost, the situation is different. The small town is bustling, its economy flourishing with foreign revenue sent home by its many sons and daughters who moved to the United Arab Emirates over the past decades.

"Life is a lot better," says Delawar, 28. "There is work, which was not the case under the Taliban."

"Things are happening, we can do business," adds 55-year-old Zahed.

The relatively well-off town paradoxically sees more aid than the needy villages.

The UN says 150 projects, such as the renovation of roads and schools, have been carried out in Khost in recent years, compared to 10 in Gurbaz or five in Jaji, the districts less stable than the provincial capital.

The number of students attending the Khost University has doubled to reach 1,310, according to its president, Faiz Mohammed Fayyaz.

And the hospital, the only in the province, has been renovated. But it still does not have enough qualified staff, with potential candidates opting for better salaries from non-government organizations, director Amir Pacha Mangal says.

A lot more needs to be done, says deputy provincial governor Ajab Khan Mangan, who complains that reconstruction is hamstrung by a "lack of interest" from the central government in Kabul, a lack of cooperation between donors and local authorities and NGO inefficiency.

An employee with an Italian NGO says in defense: "We have given new generators and water pumps and trained Afghans how to use them. But they have been broken or fallen into disrepair."

One project in the city was the renovation, at a cost of $25,000, of a government building that was used as the base for the election commission that ran the September parliamentary vote.

Their job over, the commission handed the modern building back to the government for public use.

But today, aid workers and residents say, it is the private residence of the deputy governor, Mangan.

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