ON the streets of this city, the 8,500 American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan are nearly invisible. The best way to spot one usually is to roam Chicken Street, a cluster of shops that sell the detritus of the last two failed military occupations here -- muskets from the British colonial era and Soviet-made bayonets. Souvenir-seeking American G.I.'s seem drawn to them like moths.
Some 1,400 miles away on the streets of Baghdad, the opposite is true. American soldiers are virtually omnipresent. Armed to the teeth and enveloped in body armor, 145,000 American soldiers carry out patrols across the country, man checkpoints, arrest criminals and guard gas and power stations. Iraqis often stand beside them as trainees or translators.
The scenes reflect the widely divergent approaches the United States has taken to governing postwar Iraq and postwar Afghanistan -- occupation heavy or lite, if you will. While they reflect the combat strategies that helped win swift military victories in both countries, they have helped to create troubled peaces.
Recently, signs have emerged in both countries that American officials are deciding neither extreme is right.
In Iraq last week, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator of the country, reversed course and agreed to cede extensive power to an interim Iraqi governing council. The council will appoint and dismiss ministers, set budgets, send diplomats abroad and perhaps play a role in security. One aim is to reduce the role that the United States plays as an omnipotent foreign occupier. Mr. Bremer had insisted that the body had to be an advisory ''political council'' with little real power, and his change of policy was welcomed by a number of Iraqi leaders.
''We think now that the Americans realize that Iraqis are the only ones with the experience for maintaining security, administration and for filling the political vacuum,'' said Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite political figure.
In Afghanistan, by contrast, American officials have often been accused of trying to rebuild the country on the cheap and of tolerating the rule of warlords in the countryside. Now, though, American officials have committed the United States to building a national police force as well as a new national army. They have also shown more flexibility on using American reconstruction teams as de facto peacekeepers outside of Kabul.
The changes have come as Afghanistan continues to experience instability. Last week, a mob ransacked the Pakistani Embassy in Kabul after Afghan officials accused Pakistan of harboring Taliban fighters. Eleven people died in continued factional fighting in the north. And warlords backed by the United States during the war continued to resist new efforts by Western diplomats to get them to cede power to the country's weak central government.
On the ground in both countries, the light and heavy occupation approaches have produced unintended consequences. The dynamics of rebuilding a power plant or organizing other civic projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, are completely different, but the results can be frustratingly similar.
Here, the number of American troops and international peacekeepers has been minimized, in part to ease resentment of foreign troops on the part of fiercely nationalistic Afghans.
But the scarcity of troops contributes to lapses in security. In April, for example, after suspected Taliban fighters killed a worker with the International Committee of the Red Cross, most aid work in the southeast came to a halt. Diplomats now say that aid projects that could engender good will from Afghans are ready to launch, but cannot be carried out.
In Iraq, by contrast, the lack of a broad international coalition and the focus on an overwhelming military force appear to have produced a smaller contingent of foreign aid workers. Officials will not release exact figures, but the office of Mr. Bremer is thought to have only 1,000 to 2,000 civilian employees at this point. The result is that in the first two months after Saddam Hussein's fall, American military units often did reconstruction jobs on their own.
In the weeks after Mr. Hussein's fall, American military officers in their 20's and 30's were ordered to oversee efforts to repair power plants, open banks, pick up trash, reopen schools, purify drinking water and form town councils. Many openly admitted they had no idea what they were doing.
POLICING is another example. In Iraq, American soldiers have done nearly all of the policing themselves and have not relied on local opposition groups as they did in Afghanistan. The Americans generally do not speak Arabic and cannot read most road signs. This obviously limits their ability to be effective and feeds the perception of the United States as a huge foreign occupying force.
In Afghanistan, locals have been relied on heavily for war fighting and policing, and this has clearly helped in dealing with ordinary Afghans. But Western diplomats have now spent months unsuccessfully trying to convince Afghanistan's defense minister, Muhammad Qasim Fahim, whose Northern Alliance troops took Kabul, to share power with other factions. His supporters have also been accused of trying to make sure that their ethnic group, the Tajiks, dominates the new national army and police force.
How to get it right in both countries?
Both Afghans and Iraqis say they want more balance between military and reconstruction efforts.
The United States is currently spending roughly $1 billion a year in reconstruction aid in Afghanistan, according to American officials. It is currently spending roughly $11 billion on its military mission there. In Iraq, if current spending levels continue, the United States will spend roughly $46 billion a year on its postwar military mission.
Iraqis and Afghans who want to cooperate with the Americans also say they want to be treated as equal partners in a serious, long-term effort to recast their societies.
Such flowery sentiment from Iraqi and Afghan political leaders may be driven by a naked desire for political power and patronage. But for practical reasons, Americans leaders in both countries seem to be altering their approaches.