Karzai inauguration: the empty city of Kabul

Kabul was the emptiest of cities this morning.

The only way to move around – given the universal ban on private vehicles that has successfully staved off the predictable attack by the Taliban – was on foot. The traffic that usually blocks the city vanished.

We found ourselves learning that routes between places we normally travel actually take 20 minutes on foot, rather than an hour by car in the gridlocked streets.

The emptiness just added to the surreality of the occasion. Behind high walls, with foreign dignitaries, an almost virtual president of a virtual government was taking office for another five years.

I may be being too harsh, but there are times when President Karzai’s writ seems almost non-existent.

Granted, he has power: but it is power over power and its assets (the police, army, ministries, government business), not power over a country.

So much of Afghanistan is outside of Nato and the Afghan government’s reach that today’s target of handing over the worse areas to Afghan security forces seems remote at best, vacuously rhetorical at worst.

The ceremony that took place under high security was the ugly end to months of electoral chaos in which democracy here began to look like a cycle of backroom dealings and arm-twisting, quite removed from the Afghan people’s mandate.

Perhaps it was a fitting climax to an electoral process whose second round was cancelled as the only opponent dropped out, fearing it would be too fraudulent to even partake in.

Still, we have walked around empty streets and almost run to the British Embassy to hear David Miliband do his best to explain why he believes President Karzai’s statements of intent this time.

Today does not feel like the beginning of something new – Karzai’s second term, for instance – but the end of the period in which Western countries could pretend they would leave behind an Afghanistan fashioned in their image.

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