Doubts intensify over Afghanistan's future

When the Taliban suicide car bomb struck the center of Kabul on Friday, it found grandmother Amena Wahidi in the wrong place at the wrong time – and signaled that five years after Sept. 11, the first chapter in the US war on terror is far from over.

Mrs. Wahidi died, along with 13 other Afghan civilians and two US soldiers, when the explosion in central Kabul – the first such Taliban attack in the Afghan capital – targeted a US military convoy. The attack coincides with heavy resistance from Taliban fighters to the new NATO presence in southern Afghanistan. NATO forces say they have killed some 420 fighters over the past week alone.

"The Taliban are showing that they can operate anywhere at will, even in very high security areas," says Joanna Nathan, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group in Kabul. "It is a not a popular uprising at the moment, but people are sitting on the fence waiting to see who will be the winning side."

Popular doubt here about the long-term direction of Afghanistan reflects a perception that the government of Hamid Karzai is weak and the West has not delivered on security and reconstruction, analysts say. Military commanders, international observers, and officials are sounding urgent calls for a redoubling of efforts by the government and its Western backers.

"We can count ourselves lucky that almost five years after Sept. 11, we have approximately 35,000 to 40,000 troops here. Of course things are salvageable, but it's going to be a hard road," says Francis Vendrell, the European Union's Special Representative to Afghanistan.

Mr. Vendrell argues for a three-pronged approach: Kick out corrupt officials, fast-track reconstruction efforts, and – echoing calls by NATO's own commanders – send more troops.

"The government is facing a crisis of legitimacy," says Michael Shaikh with Human Rights Watch. "The only way to deal with this is to tackle the people within its own ranks."

In the past few months, President Karzai has made efforts to crack down on corruption and bad governance. He's appointed an attorney general who has made corruption his top target. Religious conservatives have been swept off the Supreme Court, yielding to more judges trained in modern jurisprudence. And the government has dispatched a raft of new police chiefs and governors to the south, admitting that the central government has not paid enough attention to the volatile south.

"It's not that the Taliban were strong, it's that the government was weak. They have moved into a vacuum [in the south]. There was protracted negligence on our part of those provinces," says Karzai's chief of staff, Jawed Ludin.

But turning around the security situation is now a much more difficult task as the violence has spread beyond the south. Troubling signs are coming in from points north, east, and west as well, with no-go zones and pockets of violence creeping steadily toward the capital:

Page: 1 | 2