LOS ANGELES, Sept 9 (AFP) - A documentary to premiere on US television Thursday shows Afghanistan still struggling to build a fragile democracy three years after US President George W. Bush toppled the Taliban.
As the third anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks that sparked the US strike on Afghanistan approaches, the political and media spotlight has shifted from the war-torn central Asian nation to the conflict in Iraq.
Bush is using Afghanistan's quest for peace and democracy as an example of a foreign policy triumph as he campaigns for re-election in November's poll, but the country's future remains far from settled.
But while the first presidential election in Afghan history is scheduled for next month, the country remains mired in poverty, factional fighting between opposing warlords and ethnic groups and torn between its role as an Islamic state and a modern member of the international community.
And Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in a video broadcast on Al-Jazeera television on Thursday, predicted a US "defeat" in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda was based until the October 2001 US attack.
Tamara Gould, who directed and produced the film "Afghanistan: A Hell of a Country," said the battle for stability and democracy was far from over.
"It's not an easy place to live, it's a hard life for its people and a it's a tough march towards any lasting peace and democracy," she told AFP ahead of the documentary's airing on public broadcaster PBS.
Gould, who spent seven weeks shooting the film during elections for last December's Loya Jirga, a national assembly to draw up Afghanistan's first democratic constitution, said world attention had slipped away from the reality of what was happening in Afghanistan.
"In many ways (Afghanistan) has become merged in people's minds with Iraq as Saddam Hussein has become merged with the Taliban since 9/11," she said.
"I hope this film will remind people that this is a separate place with separate problems and its own process of establishing a democracy that it has never really known."
The film depicts Afghanistan's struggle to establish a democracy after 30 years of civil war, foreign invasion and the fundamentalist Taliban's religious oppression through the eyes of two candidates to the assembly, mother-of-seven Nadira Haroti and newspaper and lawyer Rafiq Shahir.
"It's a great human story," Gould said. "We tried to take a pretty complex academic subject and make it real for people and show the Afghan people for what they are -- brave, naive and very real."
After shooting in tough conditions and interviewing ordinary Afghans and top officials, including US-backed interim President Hamid Karzai, Gould said she left Afghanistan with hope for future, despite its many problems.
"I went in quite sceptical, thinking that the democratic process was being imposed on Afghans by the international community," she said.
"But Afghans have real hope. They don't want to go back, they don't want the Taliban back and they don't want the Soviet army back. They think things can only get better now."