Appointment in Kabul

The Kabul Conference has set 2014 as a milestone for the Afghan government to assume full economic and military responsibilities of the Central Asian country. This progressive shift is conditioned by events which do not represent a wavering commitment, but were necessary to quell the growing impatience – in the United States and particularly among its European allies – with a long war in which the results do not offset the weight of NATO efforts, and in which NATO’s ability to fight in certain settings remains in question.

The actual scope of the meeting in Kabul is weak, beyond being a platform for the articulation of desires and anxieties of those present. The final statement is, above all, a list of good intentions, full of expectations, projects and promises, many of which have already been handled before — opportunistically and without visible effects — by Hamid Karzai. Perhaps one of the few concrete decisions is to, in two years, give the Afghan president (who was fraudulently re-elected last year, discredited among his own and is demonstrably corrupt) the capacity to funnel 50 percent of the massive development aid the country receives. Washington and its allies, with widely varying conviction, have cautiously supported the peaceful efforts of Karzai to reconcile with Taliban converts. As of now, the idea stands on shaky ground, due to the fact that Islamic fundamentalists reject any compromise as long as foreign troops are involved.

As it was before the conference and before the replacement of McChrystal by Petraeus as the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the two fundamental questions regarding Afghanistan remain whether NATO can win the war and how that can be done. The United States’ own secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has expressed concerns about the image projected by a conflict involving 150,000 troops, and in which every month is more deadly than the last. The ambitious objectives set by Barack Obama seem ever more distant, despite the growing U.S. military commitment. Most Afghans believe that the U.S., which maintains next summer as the beginning of its gradual withdrawal, is losing the momentum in a war that, after nine years, is already the nation’s longest international engagement.