The new President of Afghanistan, Ashraff Ghani, and Abdullah Abdullah, the country’s ‘chief executive officer’ — a new post that is to evolve into a prime ministership in two years — have their work cut out. Their swearing-in was billed as the first peaceful transition of power in Afghanistan’s history, but there is little peace. Two suicide attacks in Kabul claimed seven lives on Wednesday; a suicide bomber struck near Kabul airport on the day of the swearing-in; and, just a week ago the Taliban, more confident as U.S and NATO troops withdraw, launched a fierce assault not far from the capital, in Ghazni province. The peace process that began under the presidency of Hamid Karzai has stalled. The Taliban want to rule Afghanistan; they are hardly interested in negotiating power-sharing deals to participate in a government they consider imposed by the West. The main challenge before Mr. Ghani, a former World Bank executive and one-time Finance Minister in the Karzai government, is nothing less than to ensure peace in a country with a raging insurgency, repair an economy that is dependent on international aid, even as he crafts a foreign policy that has to take into account the demands of half a dozen regional powers, including Pakistan, and countries beyond. Mr. Karzai, eager towards the end of his term to get rid of the pro-West tag that was attached to him, had been reluctant to sign an agreement allowing some U.S. troops to stay on after the drawdown by end-2014. Mr. Ghani has quickly drawn the line under the previous government — among his first actions as President was to ink the long pending Bilateral Security Agreement and Status of Forces Agreement.
Compounding the difficulties is the tenuous political agreement between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah that ended the post-election deadlock. Mr. Abdullah had refused to accept his defeat in the presidential run-off against Mr. Ghani, accusing him of electoral fraud. After nearly six months of bitter negotiations, Mr. Ghani agreed to share power with Mr. Abdullah in a U.S.-brokered deal that has brought together two leaders of opposed ethnicities — Mr. Ghani is Pashtun while Mr. Abdullah is Tajik. New Delhi, which was rightly wary of Mr. Karzai’s overtures to the Taliban, must support and encourage Afghanistan’s new leadership, but in truth it is Pakistan, with its continuing lifeline to the Taliban, which holds the key to the stability and survival of the new political arrangement. That in turn is crucial to achieving long-term peace in Afghanistan and ensuring the region’s security. Unfortunately, both will be elusive until Pakistan, especially its security establishment, is able to draw the right lessons from its own pathetic internal security situation to realise that an unstable Afghanistan goes against its own interests.
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