Now, said Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit, most prosecutors in Afghanistan are laymen, many parts of the country do not have access to the court system and corruption is rampant.

But Sabit, who stood out among his fellow attorneys with his thick white beard and wild silver hair, also struck optimistic notes about the future of the judicial system in his still war-torn country.

The American-trained lawyer, who left Afghanistan in the 1970s and returned in 2002, following the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban regime, said that with proper training and increasing stability, his nation might return to having a robust judicial system.

"The most important thing," said Sabit, "is to have judges and prosecutors trained."

To that end, Sabit applauded a program at the U.'s S.J. Quinney College of Law, in which 16 Afghan attorneys are participating in an intensive three-week course in prosecutorial techniques ranging from initial investigations to incarceration.

The Global Justice Program is the first project of the U.S. State Department's Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan.

In Sabit's view, reform and education go hand in hand.

"The 30-year war we have had in Afghanistan has destroyed everything," he said. "Our judicial system is one of the things it has destroyed . . . the educated judges and the educated prosecutors we had are not with us any longer."

In the Ghor Province in central Afghanistan, for example, are 74 prosecutors working for the Department of Justice.

"Among them there are only four lawyers," Sabit said. "The rest are laymen . . . the same is true with many other provinces."

Law school dean Hiram Chodosh said a great responsibility is riding on the shoulders of lawyers like Sabit and the group of young prosecutors he addressed Thursday.

"If the criminal justice system in Afghanistan does not succeed, our entire objective - our Afghanistan strategy, our NATO strategy, our U.S. strategy will have failed," Chodosh said. "It is a daunting challenge."

mlaplante@sltrib.com