This has been one of the worst fortnights in the increasingly unhappy 10 1/2-year Afghan war for NATO and, above all, the United States and its ally, Britain.
First there was the burning of the Korans at Bagram air base, which unleashed a wave of religious fury and revenge killings of U.S. troops. Then came the deaths of six British soldiers, incinerated by a giant Taliban bomb last week, which pushed the British death toll in the war over the symbolic 400 mark. Support in Britain for an increasingly unpopular war further deteriorated. Now comes the shooting in Kandahar of 16 Afghan villagers — many of them women and children — allegedly by a rogue American soldier. All this can only have increased the determination of Prime Minister David Cameron and President Obama, his host for talks in Washington this week, to speed up their exit strategies.
But for the majority of Afghans, distressing as these events are, there are perhaps more pressing concerns. What will happen when the Americans and the rest of NATO pull out?
Afghans already feel that electoral considerations are more important to the West than the key question of whether the raw, new Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police will be up to the task of guaranteeing the country's security, especially if Pakistan'sintelligence agency, the ISI, continues to back the Taliban.
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