Afghanistan's hard road

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's signing into law of a new Constitution signals an important milestone along the road towards reuniting his war-shattered country and boosting hopes of defeating the virulent Taleban-al Qaeda insurgency.
The new Constitution has emerged from a fractious and difficult process of consensus building through a Grand Loya Jirga, where ethnic, religious and political differences almost derailed the effort.
It took US and UN intervention and mediation to ensure that the minimum goal of a basic law of the land was secured.
The new Constitution offers a bicameral legislature with a strong presidency, as Karzai wanted. It also confers equal status on men and women, a provision directly the opposite of the dispensation imposed by the Taleban.
The charter obtained from the Loya Jirga envisages elections to be held by June this year, a target that may well be impossible to achieve.
Voter registration lags behind schedule, not the least because of security concerns, particularly in outlying provinces where the Taleban Al Qaeda combine continues to mount almost daily attacks against the US and Afghan troops.
The ISAF contingent so far has remained confined to Kabul, despite repeated requests by the Afghan government for its mandate to be extended to the provinces outside the capital.
Kabul itself can hardly be described as safe, given that one Canadian soldier and an Afghan civilian were killed in a suicide bombing on Monday, and three British soldiers wounded in another bomb attack inside the capital on Wednesday.
The pattern of military and political developments in Afghanistan since the Bonn Conference that laid down the parameters of the post-Taleban dispensation and the steps required internally and internationally to support and consolidate that dispensation has an eerie resemblance to what is transpiring in Iraq.
Here too, American troops are battling an increasingly effective insurgency, and talk of introducing a democratic system through elections by this summer is fraught with grave doubts and internal political fissures.
In Afghanistan, the tactical convergence of warlords holding sway in their provincial fiefdoms and a weak central government in Kabul, remains problematic.
The project of rebuilding an Afghan state and society that answers to the norms of a modern polity is bogged down in the ethnic, tribal and political fractures that define today's Afghanistan.
Despite this litany of the obstacles to progress in Afghanistan, the rebuilding project is still doable, provided the necessary steps are taken. These are by now no secret.
The West has to deliver on its promises of aid to wean the young men under arms away from warlord militias and into productive employment.
Without these external resources, the country cannot get on its feet let alone embark on reconstruction on a scale that could make a real difference and erode the appeal of the Taleban through relative economic prosperity. But this effort has to go hand in hand with smashing the remnants of the Taleban and Al Qaeda, still believed to be operating along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
This is a task in the interests obviously of the Afghan people and the answer to Western concerns about terrorism in the region. But it needs to be said that it is also in the interests of Pakistan to see the chapter of Jihad in Afghanistan brought to a close and for peace to prevail on our western border.
That peace would open up the possibility of an economic bonanza for both Pakistan and Afghanistan, based on increased trade and investment in the rebuilding of Afghanistan, and allowing that country to play its potentially lucrative role as a bridge for energy sources, trade and investment in Central Asia. Pakistan must do more than its bit in this venture, if the politics of religious extremism, which owes its origins to the struggle in Afghanistan, is to be finally defeated in that country, and by extension in the region as a whole.