WHAT would Afghanistan look like now if Ashraf Ghani, not Hamid Karzai, had been the Anglophone Pushtun promoted by America, back in 2001, to lead the country? Afghanistan’s new president, a frail figure in white salwar kameez, grins, eyes twinkling, tantalised by the suggestion. “Let’s not discuss what we cannot change,” he then says, seated, for his first interview as president, in the shoddy grandeur of his palace in Kabul. So let Banyan attempt an answer.

On the basis of his first month in office and, more important, his two years as finance minister in the government of warlords and technocrats formed after the Taliban’s fall, Afghanistan would be in much better shape than it is. That is not only because Mr Ghani achieved a lot in a short time, setting up computer systems and a single Treasury account where there had been only paper files and broken chairs. It was also because the former World Banker had a vision for how Afghanistan should seize the great opportunity, including billions in aid money, suddenly afforded it. He promoted road-building, to restore ancient trade-routes. He denounced the regional strongmen sucking up his customs revenue. He was not universally liked. He could seem arrogant and was hot-tempered; many thought him Utopian. But after Mr Ghani left the government in a huff he was badly missed.

Mr Karzai was a disaster. He offended Afghanistan’s benefactors and neighbours even as, presiding over corrupt elections and a spreading kleptocracy, he encouraged Afghans to consider their democracy a fraud. Today’s strongmen control more than border trade; they have grabbed property in Kabul worth billions of dollars, run a drugs business equal to perhaps 15% of economic output and enjoy blissful impunity—as displayed in the protracted theft of nearly a billion dollars from Kabul Bank. Despite the trillion-dollar cost of Afghanistan’s 13-year war and reconstruction, the poverty rate has been static—at around 36%—for years. That is fuel for an insurgency which, even as foreign troops withdraw, ravages the country. Mr Ghani’s plans for reforming Afghanistan were always optimistic. They might now seem fanciful.

That is even before considering the weakness of his government, which, after a dispute over the election result, Mr Ghani will preside over with his erstwhile rival and now chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah. “The risks are enormous,” he concedes. “Criminal networks pose a major challenge to the functioning of our legal economy, we have no peace, and if we fail, our people could lose several generations.” Yet Mr Ghani, who has co-written a thoughtful book on fixing failed states, relishes his task.

Given better government, he believes, most Afghans would embrace the rule of law. To that end he has ordered a retrial of the accused in the Kabul Bank heist: “I’ll put them in prison for dozens of years, and never will there be another banking crisis.” He has reformed the attorney-general’s office and set about appointing new Supreme Court judges. Bigger reforms, including to tax collection and the land registry, will follow. “Most of Kabul is informal, that is, illegal, and people in illegal circumstances are preyed upon. Our aim is not only to clean the government but make people more independent of it.”

On travels abroad he has given other clues to his plans. In Saudi Arabia he made plain that, though partly Western-educated and married to a Lebanese Christian—whom, momentously, he thanked in his inauguration speech—he is a Muslim leader. In Beijing he raised access to Afghanistan’s mineral resources and the mutual threat of jihadism; both reasons, he suggested, for China to lean on Pakistan to stop succouring the Taliban. Mr Ghani’s subsequent visit to Islamabad was a success, however. “The choice for us both is to become the Asian economic roundabout or to sink,” he says of his country’s enemy. Your columnist wondered how the Pakistanis viewed him. “As a partner and an Afghan nationalist, who’s secure in the sovereignty of his country,” he says, which is as near as he gets to knocking his predecessor.

Where Mr Karzai called the Taliban his brothers and berated the Western troops who shed much blood, including their own, Mr Ghani has signed a defence pact with America and praised the sacrifices of Western and Afghan soldiers. The Taliban are his foe—yet he promises a fresh push for a negotiated peace. “We need it, we are keen on it, and we will move in this regard.”

A merit-based failing state

These are big claims for a man battling to form a government, a deadline for the new cabinet having lapsed as negotiations between Mr Ghani and Mr Abdullah drag on. Mr Ghani retorts that relations between the two men are excellent and that 15 new ministers will be named before a conference of donor countries in London on December 4th. In due course he promises a bigger clear-out—“the government is dysfunctional. We need fresh faces”—and that his appointments will be based on “merit, inclusion, representation and gender.” Banyan suggests that leaves open a possibility of one or two villains. “I’m not preparing you for villains! I’m preparing you for a team that can function,” he says. “You know there’s a complex spatial and social balance, as Lincoln observed back when the population of the USA was 30m, the same as ours.”

That was typical Ghani—learned, right-minded and defiant; but also prone to a sort of development gobbledygook that can raise doubts about the feasibility of his plans. Perhaps it will turn out he never was the right man to lead Afghanistan. He is still irascible. Yet the cautious, court politics many of his critics advocated was exemplified by Mr Karzai. In his analysis of Afghanistan’s problems and the likeliest solutions, moreover, Mr Ghani has the advantage of being right. That is why Afghans, the subject of all manner of half-baked experiments, are right to be hopeful. In his second coming, Mr Ghani could again leave Afghanistan looking much better than when he found it.