Afghanistan's new leader selected Ashraf Ghani, an adjunct professor with the Johns Hopkins University, as his finance minister yesterday, assigning him the herculean task of rebuilding the country's shattered economy.

The appointment, made by Hamid Karzai and approved along with the rest of his new Cabinet by the grand council, comes in addition to another daunting task Ghani had already assumed: coordinating the hundreds of millions of dollars in financial help promised to rebuild Afghanistan.

"My job," he said this week in a telephone interview from Kabul, "is to take our challenges from the talking stage to the implementation stage. That is enormous, this taking a country into the future."

To understand the scope of Ghani's task, consider the London Daily Telegraph's account of Karzai's return from a recent trip to friendly countries, where he went to accept financial help. Karzai, the newspaper wrote, shuttled back to Kabul not with a promise of funds to be wired but with briefcases crammed with cash: His country has had no real banking system.

Ghani, 51, was educated in Beirut, Lebanon, and New York and returned to Afghanistan in 1977 to become a professor of anthropology at Kabul University.

He fled during the Soviet invasion of 1979, took a position at Hopkins in 1983 and moved to Baltimore. He left for a job with the World Bank in Washington in 1991, though he retains his teaching title. He lectured at Hopkins in October.

His association with Karzai and his swift ascension to power began during a chance meeting toward the end of his full-time tenure at Hopkins, in 1990.

"It was my good fortune," Ghani said.

He had happened into an Afghan restaurant in Baltimore owned by Qayum Karzai, the brother of the man who would become president. They began talking, and Ghani, based only on Karzai's name, recognized where he was from and who his father had been. From there, the restaurateur and the professor quickly became friends.

When it became clear last fall that Hamid Karzai would play a major role in the new government of Afghanistan, Qayum Karzai, who was serving as an informal adviser to his brother, introduced him to Ghani.

Bombs that rained on Afghanistan during the assault on the Taliban blasted holes in schools, knocked out bridges and made roads impassable. And a working economy had scarcely existed before the bombing. The country needed an enormous amount of help.

By November, when Afghanistan's wobbly interim government was just being formed, Ghani had begun overseeing what passes for remarkable progress in his native country, lobbying for creation of the quasi-governmental Afghan Assistance Coordination Authority, then becoming its director.

He has proved himself a powerful strategist and administrator, becoming perhaps the most influential adviser to the Afghan president. Even before his appointment, Ghani had been responsible for both the long-term strategy and day-to-day operation of rebuilding efforts, a task complicated by a need to solicit international funds while trying to recapture and maintain some Afghan autonomy.

As director of the assistance agency, Ghani's primary job has been to coordinate the rebuilding of Afghanistan. He is expected to bring the agency, or some form of it, into his Cabinet ministry.

About $1.5 billion has been pledged this year to help Afghanistan rebuild from the years of Taliban rule, the bombings that drove them out and the spring earthquake that brought more misery to a country that had already endured so much.

"We can point to progress," Ghani said. "The challenge now is to improve the living conditions each day."

The progress has been the patching of roads, crude repairs to bridges, new roofs on schools. More permanent improvements are to come later, or so the hope goes. In the meantime, the quick fixes are creating jobs and the country is becoming increasingly functional, according to Ghani, relief agencies and journalists who remain there.

Mukesh Kapila, a British official working with the United Nations and Ghani to rebuild Afghanistan, said Ghani's structure for funneling international aid has been greeted enthusiastically by donor countries.

Never in his experience, Kapila says, has such a system been set up so quickly. Not in Sierra Leone. Not in the Balkans.

"It's really been quite remarkable. In a normal country, you'd have the government ... providing the coordination," he said. "Because Afghanistan had no government, Ghani's vision and leadership was recognized early and put to use bringing a sense of purpose and coordination to the efforts."

Born in Logar, east of Kabul, Ghani is a Pashtun, the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan.

Aside from maintaining consistency in rebuilding efforts, Ghani's appointment as finance minister was seen partly as a move to quell disagreements from some delegates to the loya jirga, or grand council, who had objected that ethnic Tajiks were dominating the Cabinet.

"He has a passion for Afghanistan that's unmatched and sees an opportunity for real success," said Barnett R. Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, who worked with Ghani while he was at the World Bank. "I think in a way he feels he doesn't know how much time he has to live and that he has to do this very quickly."

Ghani is not in perfect health. He lost part of his stomach to cancer several years ago. His immune system is weak. He rarely sleeps more than four hours a night. He considers the work, though, well worth the tax on his health.

The work, in a country that for decades has known no real central government outside of Kabul, required some adapting.

"He's always been to the point - maybe too quick to the point," said his brother, Hashmat Ghani, reached in Kabul. Ashraf Ghani's wife, Rula, and son, Tarek, are also in Afghanistan while his daughter, Mariam, remains in New York.

Other acquaintances are more blunt: Ashraf Ghani, they say, has long been more likely to speak than to listen, more likely to tell people how things are going to be rather than try to sell them on his ideas.

He agrees.

"Do they want me to suffer fools gladly? I can't," he says with a laugh. "Honestly, there are no fools here. I suppose I have learned to reflect more. You have to accept criticism and not take any criticism personally and then show that you accept the criticism when it's valid. That's really a secret to self-improvement. When wrong, quickly acknowledge you're wrong."

His first days back in Afghanistan were spent in a dusty, bomb-damaged home, no electricity, no water. He said he could not complain. "Those are the conditions that the majority of my people were living under, and many still are," he says.

His education was paid for by other Afghans - he had full scholarships to study abroad. So, even if he did not have great affection for his country, he said, he would be back helping, out of a sense of duty.

"I've come back to pay my dues," he said. "I hope my assistance is judged relevant by my people and that it is truly helpful."