Western policymakers will be delighted with President Hamid Karzai's speech at today's ceremony in Kabul where he was officially sworn in to serve a second term as Afghan president. By declaring he wanted to see the Afghan security forces take responsibility for running the country in five years, set up a tribal council to tackle the tricky issue of political reconciliation, and vowing to end the rampant corruption that has undermined his government for many years, he has pressed all the right buttons. The speech could not have been better had it been drafted by the Foreign Office or the State Department, which, come to think of it, it probably was.
But can Karzai 2 - diplomatic speak for the president's second term - be any different from Karzai 1? I doubt it, not least because, deep down, Mr Karzai, a proud Pashtun, does not take kindly to being bossed around by meddlesome foreigners, particularly when their soldiers continue to kill innocent Afghan civilians in their military campaign against the Taliban. Richard Holbrooke, the pugnacious American special envoy on Afghanistan, might think the best way to get results out of Mr Karzai is to bawl him out like some errant schoolboy, but it generally has the opposite effect in terms of delivering tangible improvements.
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