Aid floods in for Marjan the lion but Karzai's government has no money to help people

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The new government is paralysed because it has no money, and starving people in the drought-stricken north-east are eating grass, but for one resident of Afghanistan there is no lack of international funding.

Marjan, the one-eyed lion of Kabul zoo, has $400,000 (about £275,000) coming his way. Much of the cash was raised in Britain after Marjan's story and picture appeared in the tabloids with more detail than any Afghan has commanded.

The 37-year-old lion will now have heating and lighting in his cage, a ramp to help his arthritic limbs and a scratchproof mattress. "That's just the start," said John Walsh, of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, at the zoo yesterday. "With the kind of money coming, he will want for nothing."

Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister, can only dream of such largesse. His civil servants have not been paid for seven months and cabinet meetings are said to be increasingly surreal as grandiose plans are discussed without any means to fund them. United Nations emergency aid has not materialised.

The Afghan government has said it will ask for $45bn (£31bn) over 10 years at the Tokyo summit of donor nations this month. Haji Mohammed Mohaqiq, the Planning Minister, said: "We have a zero budget ... We're going to Tokyo with empty pockets."

But the figure is at least triple what had been previously discussed with donors and few believe it will be forthcoming. An EU spokesman in Brussels said: "We need to see the basis for these figures." The EU has aimed to raise $9bn for the next five years. In the meantime, schools cannot begin to rectify the damage to education from the years of Taliban rule, hospitals lack basic equipment and medicine, and the infrastructure remains shattered.

The Taliban looted the treasury. But $100m in Afghan assets remains frozen by Western nations as part of the sanctions against the Taliban regime.

Senator Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is on a visit to Kabul, called for this to be unfrozen. "For a government to maintain any credibility with the people, it has to have the ability to pay people's salaries, turn on the lights, be able to have desks, stationery, telephones, fax machines, et cetera. This is a plain fact."

There is, however, no shortage of guns and crime. Armed gangs, many former Taliban, have made most roads out of Kabul highly dangerous, and even cities such as Jalalabad and Kandahar see gunfights almost every night. Kabul, with thousands of Northern Alliance troops and 1,200 multinational peacekeepers present, had 19 murders in 48 hours.

Mr Karzai's government had given a three-day ultimatum to hand over guns. But this has been widely ignored so far and does not apply to Alliance fighters. About 1,500 of them will remain in the city, despite the Bonn Agreement stipulating that all armed militias should leave the capital.

The novel interpretation by the government is that this means they should not be on "the streets" but are perfectly entitled to stay if the guns and tanks remain in the barracks.

Meanwhile, US bombers are continuing to pound cave complexes in Zhawar, 19 miles south-west of Khost, in preparation for American ground patrols to search the caves and tunnels for Taliban and al-Qa'ida fighters.

* Malaysia announced at the weekend that two more suspected al-Qa'ida militants had been arrested, and linked Malaysian extremists to a cell in Singapore that plotted to bomb Western embassies. The government of Singapore said a total of 30 suspected militants had been arrested in the city-state and in Malaysia.