A Relativity

Afghanistan, it seems wise to assume, is at a critical point. The news is not all bad. Kabul, recently reinforced by some 4,000 freshly-trained police, feels a bit safer these days. And 21,000 extra American troops, including 17,000 already dispatched to Helmand and elsewhere, could begin to show similar results. Mr Karzai’s cabinet has also improved, with half a dozen technocrats recruited in the past year to the main economic ministries. Yet it seems clear that the international effort to bring stability to Afghanistan, in which a strong, somewhat liberal and democratic state can take root, is failing. Among a relatively few foreign experts on the country—as opposed to the thousands of fat salaried Western consultants bunkered in Kabul—the mood is bleak. “We think we’re at the center of things, but we’re not, we’re at the margins of Afghanistan,” says Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, a think-tank. “And we’re so busy having meetings and discussing our plans we’re not even seeing what’s coming at us.” Complete failure— withdrawal by NATO and a return to civil war—seems unimaginable. But failure of some lesser sort, still undefined, looks increasingly inevitable.