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• There is no hint in Mahammod Khan’s boyish face and gentle demeanour that he is a member of Parliament from Kandahar, a province in southern Afghanistan where ordinary citizens have blind dates with violent death almost every day.As he talks of leaving Kandahar for the relative safety of Kabul, Khan, a 30-something doctor of medicine, pours green tea into white china cups and leans back in his faux leather office chair that still sports remnants of a UNDP sticker. Suddenly he pulls out a paper from the desk-top printer and starts drawing a map of southern and eastern Afghanistan. He carefully sketches Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Khost and other adjoining provinces and then makes a large circle that includes parts of neighbouring Pakistan up to Quetta.
• Within Mahammod Khan’s circle lies the Gordian knot of contemporary geopolitics, untying which will not only bring peace to Afghanistan but also alter international relations far and near. Here Pakhtunwali, the ancient code that guides its numerous Pashtun tribes, potently mixes with ultra-orthodox Islam and perverse interests of various states. While the Pakhtunwali ensures magnanimous treatment of guests, radical Islam enforces untrimmed beards for men and burqa for women. It is in deference to Pakhtunwali that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar sheltered Osama bin Laden 10 years ago, despite knowing it would invite the wrath of the bald eagle.
• Rahmat Gul/ Forbes IndiaThe Taliban, a group of largely Pashtun tribesmen, belong to this region. All international efforts are now focussed on getting this group (there are, in fact, several groups with different agendas under the umbrella called Taliban) to give up arms and help save the country from total ruin. Insurgents, many reckon, are minuscule in number.“The Taliban does not have more than 10,000 fighters. And they do not have much support of the people,” says Elham Gharji, chancellor of Gawharshad Institute of Higher Learning, a one-year-old private university supported by Afghan intellectuals, academics and politicians.
• Yet insurgency is expanding despite the US-led efforts with guns and dollars, the traditional carrot and stick. After waging an exhausting war for 10 years, America wants to go home. So do its 48 allies in the International Security Assistance Force. Managing Afghanistan after 2014, when international forces are scheduled to leave, will be the main agenda of the upcoming Bonn Conference in December. A complete withdrawal in three years will be catastrophic.“It will certainly be civil war,” says Hussain Ali Yasa, chief editor of the Afghanistan Group of Newspapers that published the Daily Outlook Afghanistan in English and Dari.
• That is why the government is hoping the foreigners will stay until 2024.“At the Bonn Conference we expect the international community to commit another decade of support but in a more clear and transparent way,” second vice president Karim Khalili told Forbes India in an interview at his heavily guarded Victorian-style office in Kabul.In the milieu, the one country that seems to be close to the ordinary Afghan’s heart is India. It is also the only major nation with deep involvement but no military presence. India has committed $ 2 billion to rebuilding efforts. It has almost completed construction of a new parliament complex. It supports scores of small, community-based development projects such as building small bridges, digging tube-wells and providing vocational training to war widows in many villages, according to India’s foreign ministry. India also recently doubled the number of scholarships to Afghan students to 1,000.
• In early October, in a widely welcomed move, India signed a strategic pact to train and equip Afghanistan’s defence forces. India also wields considerable soft power through its widely popular television soaps and Bollywood movies. Its influence in Afghanistan’s politics is still disproportionately small compared to Pakistan’s and the US’, or even Iran’s, but inching up slowly. At a conference in Istanbul in early November, India’s position as an important regional player in Afghanistan was affirmed by President Karzai.
• Meanwhile, the mistrust of Pakistan is increasing. In fact, many, including senior government officials, hold Pakistan and the US responsible for the state of their country. One top official in the commerce ministry points out that despite signing a trade and transit agreement, Pakistan officials routinely harass Afghan trucks and traders on flimsy grounds.“Pakistan has always used the border as a political tool, opening and closing it as a pressure tactic,” says Waliullah Rahmani, executive director of the Kabul Centre for Strategic Studies (KCSS).
• The Lost Years,In the decade since the first Bonn Conference - held in December 2001 after America routed the Taliban, who withdrew to the region in Mahammod Khan’s circle - more than 50 countries have been involved in stabilising Afghanistan, with little success. The international community pledged a total aid of $ 90 billion, of which about $ 57 billion has been disbursed. Of that, $ 29 billion was spent on the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police alone, says International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent organisation that works to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts across the world. But that is not enough.
• “There is no possibility that any amount of international assistance to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will stabilise the country in the next three years unless there are significant changes in international strategies, priorities and programmes,” ICG warns in an August 2011 report. The ANSF was 305,600 strong by October and was to be ramped up to 352,000. However, talks are already on to scale down this number. A report released in October by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) says that its audits of contracts and programmes to provide infrastructure, sustain forces, and assess ANSF capabilities have repeatedly found problems related to costs, schedule delays, and sustainability.
• Many believe that the international community’s strategy in Afghanistan was flawed from the beginning. “The international community doesn’t know what they are playing with and how,” says Rahmani of KCSS. “Each country is following its own national interest,” says Rahmani, a long-haired, boyish looking political science and strategic studies scholar from UCLA.Former British Ambassador to Afghanistan Sherard Cowper-Coles writes in a recent book, Cables from Kabul, that the international community had no cohesive strategy. “In Kabul, the US embassy never succeeded in taking overall charge of the US effort in Afghanistan,” he writes. “One of the main principles of COIN (counter-insurgency), unity of command, is honoured more in the breach than in the observance.” All that after the US spending about $ 125 billion on Afghanistan every year, he says.
• Earlier, when the hunt for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda members was the most intense, the US shovelled millions of dollars to local warlords to fight as its proxies. Until 2010, only 18 percent of foreign aid was routed through the Afghan government.The Development Cooperation Report 2010 of Afghanistan’s finance ministry concludes that “overseas development assistance delivery by-passing government budget channels results in missed opportunity of the Afghan government to learn by doing and thereby develop the required capacity to design, implement, monitor and report on development programmes”.
• At last year’s Kabul conference it was decided that by the end of 2011 the proportion of assistance channelled through the government would increase to 50 percent. It still has not, and leakage is heavy.A lot of international aid is spent on advising the Afghans. There are 282 advisors in the interior ministry alone, 120 of whom are contractors, absorbing a total of $ 36 million a year, according to ICG. In its logistics department, international staff reportedly outnumber the Afghans they advise by 45 to 14, it says.Still, international funding has helped build 4,000 km of roads, get power supply to 30 percent of the country (against a mere 10 percent in 2001), and helped make steady progress in education.
• There are now about 10,000 schools across the country. Enrolment in schools has gone up six times since 2001 and now stands at around 6.3 million, more than a third of them girls. Before 2001, the Taliban had banned girls’ education. Even now schools are frequently destroyed. In the third week of October two girls’ schools with a combined student strength of 3,150 in Nangarhar province were gutted by unidentified gunmen. Clearly, the initial strategy of ‘capture, hold, build’ is unravelling in many places, holding the country at the bottom of human development rankings and second among corrupt nations.
• Recent World Bank estimates show that Afghanistan remains the lowest of low-income countries. More than half of its population of 29 million lives on $ 30 a month or less. There is no sustainable livelihood alternative, especially in far-flung provinces such as Uruzgan and Nimroz, to primitive farming. A large part of its GDP is made up of poppy farming, which is smuggled to other countries. Hardly any revenue from poppy cultivation reaches the government but a lot of it goes to enrich warlords and insurgents.“The insecurity is rising. The overall graph of our system is going down and it will have an end point - total collapse,” says Daily Outlook Afghanistan’s Yasa.

Political Weakness

• At the 2001 Bonn conference, India played a crucial role in installing Hamid Karzai as the leader of the interim government. India’s then ambassador to Afghanistan Satinder Lambah is said to have played a fine diplomatic hand in convincing the Northern Alliance to accept Karzai and then springing him as an alternative to the West’s choices. The Northern Alliance’s support gave Karzai, until then an unknown schoolteacher from an influential Pashtun family of the Popalzai tribe, the aura of pan-Afghan acceptance.However, in the seven years he has been President, Karzai has steadily lost popularity and is viewed with suspicion by both locals as well as foreigners. He runs the government with warlords such as Fahim Khan in key government positions.
• Karzai’s credibility was weakened further in 2009 when he was accused of rigging the presidential polls. Only US support and rival Abdullah Abdullah’s withdrawal from run-off polls kept him in office.“In the first phase of his presidency, Karzai used the international community as a leverage against his internal rivals,” says

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