Clinton signals new line on Kabul

KABUL: The Presidential Palace in Kabul is viewing Barack Obama’s move into the White House next week with great unease.

Hillary Clinton, who is set to become US secretary of state in a matter of days, this week labelled Afghanistan a "narco-state" whose government was "plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption".

Disquiet: Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, with Barack Obama last summer. He is likely to find the incoming US president less supportive than his predecessor, George W. Bush Setting out the tough approach of the incoming administration, Mrs Clinton said the US would "tie aid to better performance by the Afghan national government, including anti-corruption initiatives and efforts to extend the rule of law across the country". Since 2001, the US government has provided more than $32bn (€25bn, £22bn) to Afghanistan and the Obama administration wants to increase non-military aid further, as well as raise US troop numbers.

But Mrs Clinton’s comments are only the latest sign that relations with the new US administration are likely to be stormy, contrasting with the friendly ties between George W. Bush and Hamid Karzai ever since the Afghan president took office in 2002.

A visit by Joe Biden caused disquiet last year when the now vice-president-elect became so irritated with Mr Karzai that he abruptly ended the meeting.

Nor do Mr Obama’s own encounters with Mr Karzai appear to have been wholly congenial. In her testimony, Mrs Clinton remarked that "Afghanistan needs a government more able to take care of its people’s needs - something the president-elect has communicated to President Karzai."

Richard Holbrooke, the former US ambassador to the United Nations who is expected to become a special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said of the Afghan government in May: "It is weak; it is corrupt; it has a very thin leadership veneer; it is internally divided; it has never arrested any major drug lords." He said the question of whether to support Mr Karzai for a third term in elections this year would be "one of the half- dozen most important tactical decisions the next [US] president will make".

US diplomats say they support the democratic process, and not any one candidate. But a long-serving US official in Afghanistan predicted "everything will change on January 21", when a new administration ditched "the blind support we saw during the Bush years".

Others contended that the incumbent Mr Karzai was still the most likely candidate to win the presidential poll, if security concerns permitted the vote to go ahead.

The World Bank has barred four Chinese and three Filipino construction companies from bank-backed work on suspicion of conspiring to rig tenders for projects in the Philippines.

The suspensions will be an embarrassment to the Chinese government, which has faced allegations that its no-strings-attached lending to other developing countries has weakened efforts to fight corruption.