The country’s tricky politics get ever trickier

Symbol of hope in flames

IN A cramped warehouse in the east-central town of Ghazni not long ago, 20 men, including a bunch of 15-year-olds who had bunked off school, gathered around plastic tables to empty out ballot boxes and recount votes cast during Afghanistan’s parliamentary election last September. When The Economist arrived, all activity stopped, and a doddery high court judge overseeing the recount, goaded on by a media-conscious politician who had lost his seat, said nothing would happen until the sole media representative left.

Losing MPs are the only people monitoring the murky nationwide recount, which has been shunned by election-monitoring groups and Western diplomats. In Ghazni election-day violence and rampant fraud led to many votes from Pushtun districts being either uncast or disqualified. The seats went to Hazaras, a picked-upon minority. In the warehouse everybody was Pushtun.

The country’s president, Hamid Karzai, is himself a Pushtun, the biggest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Unhappy with a national result which saw his political opponents strengthened and his fellow Pushtuns fall to a minority in parliament, Mr Karzai established a special tribunal to investigate fraud and carry out recounts.

Reporting its results, the tribunal says that a quarter of MPs should be stripped of their seats. The tribunal has no credibility among election experts. The Independent Election Commission denounces it as unconstitutional. For months Western diplomats hoped that Mr Karzai would abandon it. But with relations between Mr Karzai and the West going through another rough patch—the president recently lambasted NATO forces as “occupiers”—the matter has come to a head. Mr Karzai’s office growls that there should be no “foreign interference” in the matter. Whether or not the tribunal’s findings are acted upon, parliament, a much put-upon institution, will struggle to guard the last remaining shreds of its authority.

The threat of yet another constitutional crisis comes at a fraught time. Old dividing lines from the civil-war era are starting to reopen. The concerns of many Afghans who are not Pushtuns, particularly those in the north of the country, have been growing, and not just because of Mr Karzai’s attempt to massage the parliament’s ethnic mix. These Afghans also fear the planned withdrawal of most NATO troops by the end of 2014. And they are alarmed by the president’s efforts to open peace talks with the (overwhelmingly Pushtun) Taliban. A group of northern former warlords, including Abdul Rashid Dostum (an Uzbek) and Mohammad Mohaqiq (a Hazara), both of whom supported Mr Karzai during his presidential bid in 2009, talk of establishing a formal alliance against the president.

To make matters worse, the government and its Western backers are at loggerheads over huge fraud at Kabul Bank, the country’s biggest, with powerful political connections. The IMF had declared itself unimpressed by proposals to sort out the mess. Now, Afghanistan’s central-bank governor has resigned and fled to America, claiming his life was in danger after he tried to get an unwilling government to investigate and prosecute those involved in the scandal.

There are also heightened fears about the country’s security against insurgent attacks. Just as an initial seven provinces and cities were preparing for “transition” from international to Afghan security control at the end of June, one of Kabul’s prominent hotels was attacked on June 28th by a squad of militants carrying bombs and heavy weapons. Afghan police and commandos seized control of the hotel after a bloody six-hour battle (with help from NATO air strikes). But the brazen assault on the Hotel Inter-Continental has dealt a heavy psychological blow.

Built in happier times, in the 1960s, the hotel had been scarred by rockets and factional fighting during Afghanistan’s civil war. It was refurbished after 2001 as a symbol of hope in the future. To see the hilltop building lit by red tracer bullets and rocked by explosions was a harbinger of how far Afghanistan might fall if its president, its factional leaders and the country’s international backers mismanage the country’s tricky politics.