Matthew Green, Reporter, writer and video journalist

Prospects to weigh

By Matthew Green
Copyright The Financial Times

The announcement by Barack Obama that one in three US troops will be withdrawn from the decade-old conflict within 15 months is giving rise to fears in Kabul and beyond that the Taliban may simply return.

Haji Mohammed Almas, better known by his nom de guerre The Diamond, is a worried ex-warlord. A veteran Mujahideen commander who skirmished with Soviet conscripts as a younger man, in middle age he has become a parliamentarian who moonlights by running a lucrative construction business in Kabul.

An archetypal member of the class grown fat on the influx of western aid dollars since the 2001 fall of the Taliban, Mr Almas, a member of Afghanistan's ethnic Tajik minority, has much to lose.

Bodyguards sporting fatigues and chequered scarves loiter outside his two-storey office building in Karte Parwan, a neighbourhood of muddy streets and garish mansions favoured by the elite. But for all their swagger, the gunmen cannot allay Mr Almas's biggest fear: that the drawdown of US forces will let the Taliban's Pashtun fighters once more sweep into the capital, put him out of business and turn his family into refugees.

"Even my five-year-old son is asking me: ‘Why are you dealing with infidels , why don't you join the Taliban?' says Mr Almas, who bears a scar under his right eye inflicted by a bullet during a battle with Taliban fighters in the 1990s.

Mr Almas is not the only one who is nervous. The announcement this week by Barack Obama that 33,000 American troops will leave by September next year has heightened the sense of uncertainty in Kabul. Rarely has there been such a gap between the optimistic narrative advanced in Washington of an endgame in Afghanistan and the fear among its people that a pullback could bring the return of the Taliban or a new civil war.

The US president's speech held out the prospect that Afghans would take responsibility for their security and ultimately reach a peace settlement. On a visit to soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division in upstate New York on Thursday, Mr Obama said: "We have turned a corner where we can begin to bring back some of our troops." But each strand of the exit strategy is fraught with risk.

Afghans doubt that their security forces will be ready for a handover deadline of 2014. Some fear an eventual peace deal with the Taliban might erode hard-won freedoms. Spies, diplomats and businessmen from Pakistan, India and Iran are jockeying for influence in a country that has long been a theatre of proxy war. "The risk is that regional powers will of course consider Afghanistan as their playground," says Hekmat Karzai, director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul. "Many of the old rivalries in the region and inside the country could be revived."

In 2009, Mr Obama made the Afghan war his own. Warned by his generals that the US faced the risk of defeat by a resurgent Taliban, he trebled the number of US troops in the country to 100,000 and ordered a parallel surge of civilian advisers for a project that would be nation-building in all but name. The plan was to reach a tipping point where the population would rally behind the state and turn the tide of the conflict.

That has yet to happen. In spite of the White House's claims to have reversed the Taliban momentum, the sense of insecurity in Afghanistan has peaked. Under pressure in their southern strongholds, insurgents have infiltrated the north, east and west. With 368 killed, last month was the worst for civilian casualties since the UN began tracking deaths in 2007.

Domestic concerns appear to have weighed more heavily than Afghan realities in Mr Obama's calculus. His announcement struck a compromise between hawks in the military and advocates of a more rapid withdrawal in Congress who have increasingly questioned the war's purpose – and its cost, of more than $100bn a year.

Even before Osama bin Laden was killed by American forces in a raid in Pakistan on May 2, the rationale for invading Afghanistan – to defeat al-Qaeda in the wake of the September 11 2001 attacks on the US – had evaporated . The US deployment served largely to shift the terror threat firmly across the border to Pakistan. One administration official says that the US has had no indication of a terrorist plot emanating from Afghanistan in up to eight years – and that there are only 50-75 "al-Qaeda types" fighting alongside insurgents.

The logic of withdrawal is less clear-cut in Afghanistan itself, where people are bewildered that foreign forces are leaving with fighting still raging. "The Taliban have not been defeated at all," says Fouzia Koffi, another MP. "The dates that have been given for the withdrawal are too early."

US military chiefs are also wary. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and General David Petraeus, the outgoing US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, told Congress this week that the pace of the drawdown was riskier than they had recommended.

No one, however, is predicting an imminent Taliban takeover. The US will still be left with almost 70,000 troops in Afghanistan when the surge force departs. Key Nato allies including the UK and France are broadly following the US timetable. And Afghan administrations have proved surprisingly resilient. When the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the government defied predictions of imminent collapse to cling on for a further three years with funding from Moscow.

The west will be hoping for a better outcome when it begins the formal start of the transition to Afghan control next month by handing over responsibility for seven provinces and towns – even if the process will be more one of symbol than substance.

Some units are becoming more capable, but few in Afghanistan believe that their army and police will be ready to stand alone within three years. The limitations of the security forces were exposed in April in the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif – one of the cities scheduled for handover next month – when rioters stormed a UN compound, killing seven foreigners. Focusing purely on military preparedness, however, risks obscuring a deeper problem: the state's failure to gain the legitimacy needed to resolve the country's conflicts.

Western diplomats were saying privately at the start of this year that they needed to see clear signs this summer of communities rallying behind the government in the wake of the surge. Some progress has been made in appointing district governors and setting up local councils to allocate western-funded aid. But a Taliban campaign of assassinations and suicide bombings has created a climate of fear.

"The insurgents are here," muttered Abdul Wasi, a 45-year-old who runs a grocery shop on the edge of the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban's former capital, as US soldiers patrolled past his store earlier this year. "They are walking around in civilian clothes – lots of Taliban are moving around at night."

The fragility of Afghanistan's institutions was laid bare again this week when a special tribunal appointed by Hamid Karzai, the president, overturned the election of 62 MPs out of the 249-seat lower house. Lawmakers accused the president of courting a constitutional crisis, seeking to neuter the assembly by deliberately excluding his opponents.

Political competition has been sharpened by a knowledge that the spoils of office are likely to dwindle as troops leave. US civilian assistance has fallen to a budgeted $2.5bn this year from $4.2bn in 2010. Michael O'Hanlon, a defence analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington , reckons total international aid of $10bn may drop by half.

The lack of credible government at the centre has kindled wider doubts over US plans to support Afghan attempts to negotiate with the Taliban. Supporters of talks were cheered last weekend when Robert Gates, the outgoing defence secretary, confirmed that the US had been in direct contact with insurgents. But even the most preliminary attempts have been fraught. Last year, British secret agents flew a supposedly high-level Taliban commander to Kabul who turned out to be an imposter.

Observers say the US seems to have since found a more credible interlocutor in the form of Tayyab Agha, an aide to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, who is believed to be based in Pakistan. But Pakistan's powerful military – still smarting from the humiliation of the US operation that ignored all niceties of sovereignty in order to kill bin Laden – see themselves as gatekeepers to any high-level negotiations.

The US military has waged a blistering campaign to kill or capture Taliban commanders – a strategy that some analysts believe may have hardened attitudes among insurgents and made dialogue tougher. But with the clock to withdrawal ticking, Washington has every incentive to seek a deal.

In Kabul's Karte Parwan, Mr Almas is hoping the Afghan government will hold out as its western allies scale back their presence – but his nightmare vision of a triumphant Taliban return remains seared into his mind. "So when I flee the country, of course my son will join the Taliban," he says. "What will become of him?"

Additional reporting by Fazel Reshad

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