Calculating the odds: some Talibs have come over, but many believe they can win

The posturing and counter-posturing between President Karzai and his Taliban rivals over a possible negotiated peace in Afghanistan has ended, once again, in stalemate – with the Taliban’s spokesman hissing down a phone line that the militia’s fugitive leadership will never agree to peace talks while international forces remain in the country.

But that brusque repudiation of Karzai’s offer to share power in return for a cessation of violence has less to do with the Taliban’s strength than it does with the Western-supported regime’s critical weaknesses.

The release in Pakistan of a 23-page rant entitled “The Constitution of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” – the Taliban’s blueprint for re-establishing rule over the Afghan people – speaks eloquently as to why the overwhelming majority of Afghans want nothing to do with Mullah Omar’s violent, repressive gang of dead-enders.

The constitution calls for women to remain veiled and uneducated. Any and all “un-Islamic thought” would be strictly forbidden and transgressors would be punished according to the Taliban’s warped version of Sharia law.

But it’s not just the document’s sinister tone and its leaden syntax that seems incredible. So too is the knowledge that the leaders of the world’s great democracies, the preening statesmen of the “international community,” deserve much of the blame for making the Taliban what they are today – still unworthy pretenders to power, it’s true, but deadly spoilers, all the same.

The global investment of more than $14 billion in aid, since 2001, has yielded mainly corruption and ineptitude: a broken excuse for a government in Kabul, with its debris trail stretching over the horizon, all the way to Washington, DC.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon put it in his report to the Security Council last week: "Public dissatisfaction with the government's effectiveness and the slow pace of economic reform, coupled with a deteriorating security situation, is putting pressure on President Karzai and his ministers."

And taking pressure off the Taliban.

After some notable successes by the Karzai regime, earlier this year, persuading commanders of anti-regime militias to lay down their arms in return for amnesty, the number of fighters taking up the offer has plunged.

There can be little doubt the regime’s deepening credibility crisis is the prime reason. The Taliban have been relegated to the basest forms of suicide attacks and butchery, hardly the stuff that inspires dreams of victory.

But time is on the guerrillas’ side, because there is no prospect of change at the top of the international forces’ campaign.

The Bush administration continues to insist upon overall command and control, while America’s NATO allies have proven too timid to advocate effective new strategies, much less devise them.

In short, the “internationals” are staying the course of failure – and giving Mullah Omar and his cutthroats ample reason to hang grimly on.