Today, it is a very different story. The forward momentum has all but stopped, the news has all been bad, and the country’s political future seems more uncertain than ever.

Afghan officials, stunned by President Trump’s plan to call back thousands of U.S. troops, have retreated into silence and frantic maneuvering to shore up the government. The election has been thrown into doubt and seems likely to be postponed for months. A terrorist assault on two government ministries in the capital Monday left at least 43 people dead , and the Taliban’s leverage in future power sharing seems stronger than ever.

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“The state of play in Afghanistan is becoming increasingly volatile,” said Michael Kugelman, an Afghanistan expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The new uncertainties about peace talks and the election, plus “looming U.S. troop withdrawals and a relentless Taliban insurgency,” have created a “powder keg,” he said in an email Friday.

Several Afghan observers expressed similar concerns, warning that the potential double blow of a prolonged but weakened government and a politically strengthened, still-aggressive insurgency could create a power vacuum that ends up being filled by violence and political turmoil.

“Unfortunately, the timing of the troop cutbacks has fallen right when there was an effort to convince the Taliban to accept a settlement, and at a crucial phase in a new political transition,” analyst Haroun Mir said. Now, he said, “the Taliban will have no reason to make meaningful concessions,” and it will be equally difficult to hold a credible election on time or to extend the current administration’s tenure.

Technically, the election has nothing to do with the peace talks, but the imbroglio over the timing of the vote, initially because of concerns over security and fraud, became linked to the talks last month, as U.S. officials pushed for speedy negotiations with the insurgents. Some Afghans and foreign donors urged a delay of the presidential vote, and a variety of Afghans said an interim caretaker government should be set up to oversee the peace process.

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Ghani, then widely viewed as the front-runner and adamantly opposed to an interim government, insisted that the vote be held in April as mandated by the constitution. The national elections commission vacillated for weeks, changing its mind several times. Early this week, the panel indicated that the election might be delayed by three to four months, but no announcement was made.

At the same time, the abrupt White House decision to withdraw half of the 14,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, most serving as trainers and advisers to Afghan forces, upended both the pre-electoral political calculus here and the growing sense of momentum in the peace process, especially after a third round of talks in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to which half a dozen countries extended support and Taliban leaders sent senior delegates.

When news of Trump’s plan broke here, it appeared to many Afghans and others that the Taliban, which had been waging an aggressive ground campaign and killing record numbers of Afghan security personnel for months, was being handed one of its major longtime demands — that foreign forces leave the country — without giving up anything in return. News reports said Taliban fighters were celebrating at the news and predicting an imminent victory.

“The fundamental challenge is still how to convince the Taliban to stop fighting,” Kugelman said in his email Friday. “With the insurgents poised to gain a major battlefield advantage if thousands of U.S. troops start heading for the exits, the Taliban seemingly has more incentive to take up arms than to lay them down.”

American military officials here have insisted that no matter how large or small their troop numbers, U.S. support for Afghanistan will remain steadfast. The senior U.S. commander here, Gen. Austin Scott Miller, has given several interviews in the past week to emphasize that point. He also made a quick trip to Pakistan, which has strongly supported the peace talks, to deliver the same message to its military chief.

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But Afghanistan’s military and police forces have struggled with mixed success to overcome long-term morale and institutional problems that foreign advisers can only partly address. Although Ghani has said nothing publicly in response to Trump’s decision, he moved swiftly to shore up his security team, appointing two hard-line former intelligence chiefs as his new ministers of defense and interior.

Even more than the fighting, what worries Afghans most is what political, social and religious conditions the extremist Taliban movement might impose on them in return for peace, after nearly 18 years of civilian rule in which Afghanistan has become more modern and free of repression, with extensive legal rights for women.

The beleaguered Afghan president, who took office in 2014 vowing to usher in an era of technocracy, human rights and the rule of law, is despised by the Taliban as a stooge of the United States, and the group has refused to negotiate with him. Even before the troop cuts, aides to Ghani expressed concerns that U.S. officials would make too many concessions to the insurgents to win a quick peace.

Now that his government’s most important military backer has undercut him without warning, and it appears that the presidential election will be delayed, analysts said Ghani is scrambling to consolidate his political power at all costs, co-opting critics and potential rivals with job offers, and even unofficially freeing an abusive militia commander who has a large tribal following.

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“The president is going after his political survival,” said Najib Mahmoud, a political analyst here, adding that Ghani hopes he can build a strong-enough team to remain in power if the election is delayed and still prevail at the polls next year. “But everything he is doing shows we have no political stability and no rule of law.”