Bigots without borders

If any new adverse ingredient was lacking for the allied troops now fighting in Afghanistan, it has been supplied by a bigoted Christian preacher in Florida who burned a Koran in front of some 50 of his flock. As of Monday, the repercussions of the outrage had already caused dozens of deaths - among them seven UN employees - and hundreds of injuries in Afghanistan, where protest demonstrations continued on Tuesday for the fifth consecutive day.

The American establishment's solemn condemnations of the irresponsible fanaticism of Pastor Jones, beginning with that of President Obama, are futile. Few spectacles can better illustrate the fragility of the international presence in Afghanistan, the phased withdrawal of which is to begin in July, than the tragic repercussions, almost 20,000 kilometers away, of the act of a fundamentalist visionary who profaned the sacred book of Islam.

In a country where long-standing anti-Western feeling keeps growing in intensity, the mullahs now enjoy even more auspicious conditions in which to incite their followers to every extremity their indignation may inspire, which often ends in savage lynchings. Last week's attack on the UN office in Mazar-i-Sharif, and the murder of seven members of the UN mission there, is only the most notorious incident so far in this uncontrollable spiral.

Mazar-i-Sharif is one of the cities that will come under Afghan control in the early phases of the American withdrawal, which is planned to conclude in 2013. Washington alone is spending 6 billion euros annually on training the Afghan security forces, on whom the task of keeping order in their country will fall. Yet this formidable sum does not prevent the security forces from being progressively infiltrated by the very Taliban they are fighting. This infiltration, and the more than doubtful loyalty of many of those initially selected for this service, lies behind the succession of deadly attacks from within the Afghan security forces against foreign soldiers. On Monday two NATO soldiers were killed within the perimeter of their own base.

Afghanistan is well on the way to becoming a resounding failure for the strategy of the United States and NATO. The allied forces not only face an unbridgeable cultural abyss between themselves and the Afghans, and local resentment at the deaths of innocent people, but also frustrated expectations after 10 years of intervention. President Karzai's government itself is a ramshackle contrivance of corrupt administrative machinery, with no effective control over a territory where power resides in the hands of local warlords and Taliban commanders. As far as the population is concerned, these powers are the only ones that matter.