AS if prospects for an orderly American pull-out from Afghanistan weren’t already bleak, the latest news coming out of that country reveals just how messy it’s going to be. The Quran burning and the Panjwai massacre had already raised urgent questions about the viability of the American presence, but developments in the following days have shown how complicated it will be to determine how and when to unwind that presence. At one end are a war-weary American public about to go to the polls and disagreements within the US administration and military about the timing and scale of the troops’ departure. At the other is an Afghan president demanding an early withdrawal. While officials try to conceal the dissonance in public by fudging the specifics, this only confirms the lack of clarity within and between the Obama and Karzai administrations on what the process should look like.

Then there are the Taliban claiming to have suspended American-led talks, now widely seen as a necessary component of the winding down of this war. The talks had always been an opaque affair, and very few people other than those directly involved know how they were progressing, which Taliban were at the table, how involved Afghanistan and Pakistan have been, or even what exactly is being negotiated. It’s also unclear to what extent this supposed Taliban suspension has the buy-in of various factions, or what the motivation behind it really was. The Taliban have linked it to an inability to agree on preconditions and the prisoner-swap issue. But given the questions about the American presence that have been asked across the world in the last week, this could just as well be posturing from a perceived position of strength. Given all these unknowns, it is difficult to say that the talks have come to an end. But what the announcement does indicate is that the recent conduct of American troops has given the Taliban more chips to play with even as the US tries to clarify an increasingly fraught exit strategy.

There is also the knotty but sometimes over-looked question of what happens post-2014. The Americans want a scaled-down long-term presence to keep out Al Qaeda but also presumably for geopolitical reasons, and negotiations with Mr Karzai on the issue had made progress before recent events. But it remains unclear how America expects to maintain its presence for another decade and still reach a settlement with an enemy opposed to its presence on Afghan soil. Along with many other uncertainties, it is a question that makes the next few years of Afghanistan’s future look increasingly grim.