With the injection of some 150,000 foreign troops, thousands of non-military personnel and billions of dollars spent on security, governance and the reconstruction of Afghanistan, even some senior American officials on the ground now admit that there is no certainty about the future. As one has put it, ‘the glass is half empty’ and ‘everything is reversible.’ Why is this so?

Lying at the heart of the problem is that both the Afghan state and society have become corrupt and dysfunctional.

After nine years in office now, President Karzai, once a figure of hope, is set to go down in history as an ineffective leader. His repeated promises to improve governance and the rule of law, enhance democratic practices and institutionalise politics, bring about economic and social development, and minimise corruption and heal Afghanistan’s divisions have all failed.

In order to remain in power Karzai has promoted the politics of patronage, nepotism, corruption and disregard for the rule of law. He has aided, protected and enriched a circle of family members and cronies to secure a dominant share in the political and business spheres. He has not hesitated to violate the Constitution and the law for his own ends. This has included personal intervention to secure the release of jailed corrupt officials and criminal figures, and pandering to strongmen — popularly referred to as ‘warlords’ — useful to him, as in the 2009 rigged presidential election.

Ethnic identity and division have always been an issue in Afghanistan. But the issue has never been as pervasively politicised as it is today, thanks to Karzai’s aims of dividing his political opponents.

Afghanistan’s largest ethnic cluster is Pashtun, about 42 per cent of the Afghan population. The remaining population is composed of various non-Pashtun groups. Karzai and many of his cohorts are Pashtuns. So are the Taliban, although they belong to a rival tribe. Whilst the non-Pashtun groups have remained largely peaceful, the current conflict is essentially an inter-Pashtun struggle between the Karzai government, and its foreign backers, and the Taliban, supported by Pakistan.

Karzai cultivated Hazara leaders for manipulative purposes, but this has now generated a serious impasse for him. He now views with great trepidation the rising power of the Hazaras (about 10 per cent of the population) and some other non-Pashtun ethnic groups, especially the Panjshiris. The latter played a critical role in US operations to topple the Taliban regime. One of their leading figures, Dr Abdullah, emerged as the main challenger to Karzai in the 2009 presidential election. Karzai is now particularly perturbed by the non-Pashtuns’ capturing of almost two-thirds of the Lower House seats in the September 2010 parliamentary elections.

Following the election, he engaged in all kinds of devices, including intimidating the Independent Election Commission (whose head has been Karzai’s appointee) by seeing that members of the Commission were arrested for fraud, and requesting the Supreme Court set up a Special Court to examine the election results. Karzai’s likely objective is to either stack the numbers of his fellow, compliant Pashtuns in the Lower House; or declare null and void the results of the election, funded to the tune of $150 million by the US and some of its allies.

Karzai has stressed the importance of maintaining an ethnic balance in the parliament as justification for his maneuverings, but many regard this to be highly anti-democratic. Under domestic and international pressure, he finally opened the new parliament on 20 January 2011, but maneuverings have not stopped. Karzai’s high-handed politicisation of ethnicity has sharpened ethnic divisions more than ever. Now even his own ministers in cabinet meetings operate and gather in ethnic groups, with little concern for cabinet solidarity and national unity.

And now Karzai is desperately keen to bring on board some key Taliban and their supporters, and to pursue a policy of underhanded dealings with Islamabad, to support his failing presidency.

There is no question that the Obama administration will start scaling down US forces from mid-2011. The administration can no longer afford it. US allies are set to follow suit. Washington has come to the same conclusion as Moscow did more than two decades ago: it is involved in an unwinnable war.

But the Karzai government shows no capacity to handle Afghanistan by itself, even if the Taliban insurgency is quelled. Afghanistan is in mortal danger of breaking up into various feuding ethnic enclaves, with the country’s neighbours backing such groups in pursuit of their conflicting interests. Afghanistan’s future looks extremely bleak, possibly worse than that of Iraq. The US and its allies inherited a mess that is Afghanistan and may leave it as such at the cost of more misery and bloodshed for the Afghan people.

Amin Saikal is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University and author of Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).

This is an abridged version of an article  published in The Canberra Times and The Age.