Future obscured: Kabul faces another year of violence and aimless political posturing

Not so many years ago, bright sunshine pierced the biting autumn air of Afghanistan’s capital city with ease. But these days Kabul’s skies are opaque with smoggy mists – a canopy well in keeping, some would say, with the air of anxiety that hangs over this country’s troubled quest for peace.

No-one here can predict with certainty what 2009 will bring, except that two new factors will force significant changes on the international effort to bring stability to southwest Asia: the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency, and the realities of global recession.

It’s no longer just a question of desire on Obama’s part to address the failures of his predecessor in Afghanistan. The recession’s inevitable ravaging of U.S. spending power means he needs to act decisively, and without delay, to achieve tangible results.

The incoming administration won’t be able to lavish funds on counter-productive initiatives, such as George W. Bush’s $2 billion-per-year backhander to Pakistan’s military.

Intended to persuade the former dictator, Pervez Musharraf, to clamp down on al Qaeda and the Taliban, the infusion of U.S. tax dollars freed up hundreds of millions of rupees for Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the ISI, to continue playing the Great Game through its client militia – the Afghan Taliban.

Finally, this past year, the rising tide of violence compelled the United States’ military and intelligence services to come clean about their dysfunctional stance on Pakistan. The C.I.A.’s controversial attacks by Predator drones on terrorist targets in Pakistan’s tribal agencies have signaled a change in tack.

When Obama takes the helm, he’ll have to sail even closer to the wind, addressing not just one, but several imperatives that the Bush administration has callously ignored.

The most urgent of these: battling the rampant corruption that has rendered the U.S.-backed Karzai regime perhaps a greater threat to peace and reconstruction than the Taliban.

President Hamid Karzai makes glib pronouncements on the need for negotiations, while his brothers Qayoom, Mahmood and Wali treat the international aid program as a means of personal wealth creation. Once a focus of hope and pride for Afghans, the Karzai family has made a mockery of governmental authority.

It’s not only Afghan civilians who’ve lost confidence. Hamid Karzai's enemies among the Taliban and other opposition groups can hold little hope of getting a fair deal from the kleptocracy in Kabul, should they respond to the president’s calls for reconciliation. Even Karzai’s sponsors admit the regime would collapse within hours of a withdrawal by its international military backers.

The president hasn’t helped himself by playing politics with peace. His offer of safe passage to the Taliban’s leadership provoked equal measures of laughter in Mullah Omar’s lair near Quetta, Pakistan, and fury in Washington D.C.

One experienced hand in Kabul’s diplomatic community says: “He’d be out of here tomorrow if we had a decent alternative. Karzai has only survived because no one has put any potential successors in place – not the Afghans, not the Americans and not us (other NATO nations).”

For too long, the U.S. and its allies have treated the Kabul government as a luxury, a kind of spin-off or branch plant of the international military initiative, rather than the essential foundation for peace that any authoritative government must provide.

Now, with another year of bloodshed and worldwide economic chaos just around the corner, the time for self-delusion has run out.