Afghan army costs putting rebuilding at risk of failure

From the burnt-out remains of the old British embassy, complete with its shabby, sun scorched lawns, to the mud-walled slums still pock marked with bullet holes, Kabul is awash with reminders of its civil war.

The lamppost where president Karzai’s Soviet era predecessor, Dr Najibullah, was castrated and lynched with his brother in 1996 still teeters on a roundabout outside the presidential palace.

The rusting hulks of their protectors’ tanks – soiled, graffitied and bereft of their tracks – still sit between the houses and the hilltops where they fought when the Russian’s left.

Nato officials baulk at any comparison with the Soviets, but the spectre of another civil war, which was almost unthinkable ten years ago, is being whispered ever louder now the west prepares to leave.

“It’s important when we leave that there is a viable state here,” said the British ambassador to Afghanistan, William Patey, “that we don’t leave the seeds of ultimate destruction or instability. As we have seen in other places, states can fail. ”

Nato’s senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, Simon Gass, said memories of the last civil war – which saw ministers shell their own capital and raze entire neighbourhoods – will act like a “powerful glue” to hold the country together.

But the bulk of Nato’s combat troops will leave by 2014, irrespective of whether or not the Taleban are beaten, or even negotiating – and at the moment they are neither.

Western and Afghan officials point to three unsolved strategic issues threatening whether or not Afghanistan survives after 2014; long term financial commitments from the west, serious negotiations with the Taleban and Pakistan’s full cooperation.

The World Bank said Afghanistan needs at least $7.3 billion (£4.7bn) a year, for the next ten years just to keep the government afloat, but so far no country has promised the money and diplomats are emphatic that an international conference in Bonn next week, on the future of Afghanistan, is “not a pledging conference”.

Embryonic peace talks were derailed with the assassination of Kabul’s chief negotiator, former president Barhanuddin Rabbani. Mr Patey said he had seen “no sign” that Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Taleban, or the leadership council based in Quetta, in Pakistan, “have made a strategic choice for peace”.

Pakistan meanwhile has withdrawn its delegates from the Bonn conference, and sealed their border with Afghanistan, over simmering anger at cross-border US airstrikes.

“The Afghan army is effectively bankrupting Afghanistan,” said a senior western official familiar with the World Bank’s report. “It’s squeezing the life blood out of the rest of the country. The truth is they have got to talk to the Taleban because they can’t afford to fight them.”

But without talks, or Pakistan’s support, it will be almost impossible to cut the number of Afghan soldiers and police from 352,000 – the only way to avoid bankruptcy – without risking large parts of the country getting overrun.

Those 352,000 troops may also prove crucial to the success or failure of Afghanistan’s next presidential elections, due in 2014.  If the polls go ahead, if president Karzai steps down in line with the constitution, and if a new candidate is elected, it will be the first democratic transition of power in Afghanistan’s history.

“Lots of baby democracies that elect a leader and that’s the last time that they ever democratically elect a leader,” said Mr Patey. “The real test of democracy is the second and third leader.”

But even president Karzai’s brother is worried that won’t happen.

“It’s amazing how people get addicted to power. ” said Mahmood Karzai, who rose from restauranteur to millionaire during his brother’s tenure.

Given the risk of civil war, he said Afghanistan’s greatest achievement in the last ten years was to stay together. But it is fragile, and if the country disintegrate, as he knows it might, he won’t hang about to meet Najibullah’s brother’s awful fate.

“I don’t want to leave Afghanistan,” he said. “But if the Taleban defeats us I will have no choice.”