The rows of bombed-out and upturned Soviet era-planes that littered the ground at Kabul airport are gone. Gone also is the confusion that used to reign in the small immigration control office or over at the baggage belt in a dark corner of the damp building. You are quickly waved through, the bags have arrived and you are whisked off in Kabul’s crisp early morning air.

Returning to the Afghan capital after five years is both reassuring and a little bit disconcerting. Traffic clogs the dusty streets, people crane their necks out of cars hollering at each other to give way, smiling school girls in twos or threes wait by the roadside for a ride home in the crowded cabs. Mobile phone shops have sprung up everywhere, and everyone uses the phones. You even have shalwar-clad men standing at street corners selling Afghanis for dollars in one hand and pre-paid calling cards for your phone on the other.

Five years ago, it was a city that seemed to have just crept out of years of darkness. The signs of war were still there  - in the pock-marked government buildings and houses, and in the men and children you saw on almost every other street with an arm or a leg amputated because of a mine blast in the world’s most mined nation. You would also see a lot more former soldiers, members of one or other of the warlords, walking the streets still in military fatigues figuring out a future now that the war was over.

Most of that has gone. The grass has grown and there is a football game on in the stadium where the Taliban conducted public executions.

But then you look at Kabul’s high-walled compounds with their blast barriers, sandbags and concertina wire running all around to keep  suicide bombers as far away as possible, and you know that things can turn ugly very quickly. Five years on, the walls of the embassies and other foreign organisations have grown taller, there are more checkpoints and more roads that are either cordoned off completely  or regulated, and you begin to feel the insecurity that the city, especially the expatriate part of it, lives with constantly.

The assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in April, the Indian embassy bombing in July and last month’s Taliban ambush of French soldiers outside Kabul have added to a sense of siege that in some ways began with the storming of the luxurious Serena hotel earlier this year.

If large parts of the country have remained no-go areas, even the capital can feel menacing at times, especially for foreigners. Some people are starting to talk of the Taliban at the gates of Kabul, which along with Kandahar has traditionally held the key to dominanace over the fractious nation.

So what is the image to take away ? Of the laughter of children as they run home after school or that of a garrison city living in fear of the next attack? 

Some people have begun to voice what has been for some time an unspoken fear in Pakistan - that of a U.S. attack.

What would happen if there were to be another big attack  on the United States that is traced back to militants holed up in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the Afghan border?

“Such an attack would immediately trigger massive bombing and an invasion of Pakistan by the U.S. and NATO,” says Riaz Haq in his blog Haq’s musings. “It could also result in the removal of the democratically elected government and installation of a new military regime in Pakistan,” he writes. “In addition to unparalleled death and destruction, such a scenario could turn Pakistan into a failed state with widespread unrest, homelessness, poverty, hunger and disease.”

Within the United States, he says, it would mean the election of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

A top adviser to McCain appeared to corroborate that bit at least when he was quoted as telling Fortune magazine that a Sept.11-type attack before the November election would benefit McCain. Charlie Black has since apologised for his remarks following widespread criticism.

Haq is the not the only one worrying about the months ahead. Pakistani blogger Farrukh Khan Pitafi  goes as far as to say : “Accept it or not, Pakistan is the next target of the U.S. invasion.” Over-reaction ?  Paranoia ?

You could argue both, but four months after Pakistan voted a civilian government into office there is a leadership void in  Islamabad, argues the New York Times, and perhaps that is feeding some of the insecurities. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in charge, and there is even less coherence on dealing with al Qaeda and the Taliban. The confusion is allowing the militants to consolidate their sanctuaries while spreading their tentacles all along the border area.

U.S. air strikes earlier this month in Pakistan’s Mohmand agency that killed 11 soldiers of the Frontier Corps,  followed up by a threat by Afghanistan’s Washington-backed President Hamid Karzai to chase down militants inside Pakistan, have heightened the anxiety.

But it isn’t just Pakistan. Descent into Chaos  is the title of reputed Pakistani journalist and author Ahmad Rashid’s latest book and it, according to the reviews, chronicles how the war against Islamist extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.
 

So which troops is Afghan President Hamid Karzai going to send to Pakistan to make good his threat to  hunt Baitullah Mehsud and his men, and stop cross-border attacks? The Afghan National Army, the Afghan national police ? Aren’t they already too stretched trying to cope with the Taliban inside Afghanistan to worry about them across the border ?

Indeed Karzai spoke barely a  couple of days after 1,150 prisoners, an estimated 400 of them militants, escaped Kandahar jail after it was stormed by the Taliban in what must be one of biggest jailbreaks, even by Afghan standards

It is hard to see how Karzai can extend his reach into Pakistan’s rugged frontier region when his writ barely runs in his country. Or was he speaking on behalf of someone else, the United States, for example, as journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai asks in this piece.

“One is sure President Karzai doesn’t mean to carry out his threat to send Afghan troops across the border to Pakistan,” he writes. “The only manner in which he can hope to do so is to convince the U.S. and its Nato allies to undertake such a mission in Pakistan and then order some of his Afghan soldiers to accompany the Western forces.”

At a time when America has increased the  pressure on Pakistan by opposing its peace accords with Taliban militants and launching airstrikes in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan,  such a gameplan, however dangerous,  may not be impossible.
 
 

It would be hard to think of a more complex web of problems.  Pakistan and Afghanistan face, in very different ways, severe domestic political crises which are being exacerbated by soaring prices and food shortages. Both blame each other for failing to crack down on the Taliban and al Qaeda. And now tensions are rising over attempts by Pakistan, the traditional supplier of food to Afghanistan, to curb its wheat exports to make sure it can feed its own hungry population.

For an idea of how significant this is in Afghanistan, it’s worth reading this piece in the Chicago Tribune. “Western officials - including officers with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force - say the food crisis is potentially more destabilizing to the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai than the insurgency itself,” it says.

The website Registan.net followed this up by saying that the food crisis will drive more people into the arms of the Taliban. “Hungry, disenfranchised people are angry people,” it says. ”… every time someone can’t afford to buy bread for his family, he’ll have one more reason to … blow up some Humvees.

The World Food Programme says that emergency food aid meant to help 2.55 million Afghans affected by soaring food prices has reached only about 38 percent of the targeted population, according to IRIN, largely due to curbs on Pakistani food exports.

“One of the main reasons why food aid has not yet reached even half the targeted communities is procurement and logistical hurdles,” IRIN reports. “Initially it was decided that wheat and other food items would be procured from markets in neighbouring countries, especially Pakistan, which traditionally supplies Afghan food markets. However, rising prices have prompted Pakistani authorities to impose a strict ban on food exports, hitting WFP’s operation in Afghanistan.” 

Yet look at it from Pakistan’s point of view. It has a shaky coalition government which will become all the more vulnerable if it doesn’t make sure its people have enough food to eat. For all its interference in Afghanistan, it has also felt the burden of supporting three million Afghan refugees. 

“The priority must be on feeding the people of Pakistan, not excluding the three million Afghan refugees who still enjoy our hospitality, Hamid Karzai and company’s ingratitude notwithstanding,” wrote Ikram Seghal in The News last month. “Find me another nation in the world having so many refugees.”

Can someone see a way out of this morass? Or are Pakistan and Afghanistan condemned to stumble from crisis to crisis until historians write, with 20/20 hindsight, that whatever happens next was inevitable?