Afghanistan

Whatever happens in Kabul now, the next couple of months will be hard going. Hamid Karzai will form a new government, perhaps with Abdulllah Abdullah. But nobody expects the Karzai III government to be any better or less corrupt than versions I and II. Quite the opposite. In his bid for re-election, President Karzai surrounded himself with chequered figures who could bring him votes: warlords suspected of war crimes, corruption and drug trafficking. None is as influential as Marshal Fahim, his running mate, who has long been suspected of drug-running and other crimes. Expect to look back at the Afghan government’s past performance as a model of probity and efficiency.

Today, two of my colleagues, former senior MoD official Nick Witney and US analyst Jeremy Shapiro, issued a hard-hitting report about transatlantic relationships. Their message is simple. Europe has the US president it wished for, but Barack Obama lacks the strong transatlantic partner he desired. With EU leaders heading to Washington for their transatlantic summit on 3 November, Shapiro and Witney caution European governments: an unsentimental President Obama has already lost patience with a Europe lacking coherence and purpose. In a post-American world, the United States knows it needs effective partners. And if Europe cannot step up, the US will look for other privileged partners to do business with. Unfortunately, many Europeans are in denial about how the world is changing.

I have just returned from DC, where the talk of the town, or at least of the foreign policy community, is how long Richard Holbrooke has left in the Obama administration. A well-connected friend suggested The Bulldozer has, at most, two months left. Perhaps most telling has been Holbrooke's absence in the recent efforts to persuade Hamid Karzai to accept a second round of voting in the presidential election. The Economist hailed John Kerry's impromptu diplomacy, which secured Karzai's consent and gave Holbrooke the epithet "now-absent". Diplomats I have spoken to say President Karzai is currently refusing to see Holbrooke at all, possibly sensing a chance to divide and weaken the US players.

Gordon Brown’s Afghanistan and Pakistan statement was virtually identical to the joint statement he gave with Battlin’ Bob in August. Once again, the government are pinning their hopes on a tactic called “Afghanisation” – by which they mean conducting operations alongside Afghan forces and police, and the steady extension of Kabul’s authority into the localities. I’ve debated this before, but I doubt that an Afghan police force that is drug tested because its officers consume opium prodigiously can be relied upon to even hand out parking tickets; and, more importantly, Nato’s strategy rests on the contestable assumption that ordinary Afghans believe that Afghanistan exists as a political entity and that they want a stake in it.

When I first saw the headline Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize, I thought I must have read it wrong. After all, what has Obama actually accomplished in his first nine months in office? (Obviously, that’s not to say he won’t accomplish foreign policy successes in his time in office but he certainly hasn’t yet).   On the foreign policy front, Obama is not actually having much success. Having announced Afghan strategy months into his presidency, he is now reviewing it and seems intent on second-guessing the new commander he appointed. Also for all the goodwill towards him in Europe, he has not got the Europeans to commit substantially more resources to the conflict.