AP 30 September, 2004 President Hamid Karzai inaugurated Afghanistan's rebuilt national museum by cutting a  pink ribbon to mark the completion of the refit of the two-story museum, whose building was destroyed in civil war and whose collection was further decimated by the Taliban. 

The opening of the National Museum was billed as official presidential business, rather than an election booster. Karzai says he's too busy to stump for votes.

But TV crews and photographers were allowed to join his tour of the gleaming white building, the third such event since Sunday for a leader usually confined to his fortified palace because of concerns for his safety. 

Flanked by a clutch of ministers and diplomats as well as his heavily armed bodyguards, Karzai inspected tables laden with pieces of artifacts smashed after the Taliban captured the capital in 1996 and banned human images as un-Islamic.

He peered over the shoulder of a white-coated restorer trying to put a statue back together. 

The entire top floor of the museum was destroyed during the civil war, which broke out among Afghanistan's mujahideen factions after Soviet occupiers withdrew in 1989.

Officials rescued some of the collection from the destruction and looters, but Taliban-sanctioned mobs demolished much of what was left after the hardline militia captured the city in 1996.

Some $350,000 has been spent since 2003 to fix the building, which lies in the shadow of a gutted former royal palace in the war-ravaged west of the capital.

Culture Minister Makhdom Raheen said 2,500 artifacts had been recovered from the collection, which was once one of the finest in Central Asia with 100,000 items dated back several millennia. A few dozen have been repaired.

The museum still needs display cases, security systems and trained staff before it can open to the public, officials said.