The first heavy snowfalls of what looks like becoming a very cruel winter blanketed northern Afghanistan yesterday, imperilling the lives of hundreds of thousands of people at risk from cold, hunger and inadequate shelter and raising fears of an impending humanitarian emergency.
But with a massive international relief operation slowly cranking into motion on the coat-tails of the US war in Afghanistan, the aid effort is being hampered by an array of problems from political obstacles to lack of access, banditry, US opposition to international policing of relief supplies and infighting amid the myriad aid organisations.
Three infants died of cold and hunger at a camp of displaced people outside the northern capital, Mazar-e-Sharif, at the weekend. Relief experts said many more were certain to share their fate unless the aid effort acquired much more urgency.
Yesterday, the UN reported a disturbing new obstacle - factional fighting within the Northern Alliance which has forced it to pull its international staff out of Mazar.
"We have observations of sporadic fighting and shooting in the city, we don't have any information on who is fighting whom," UN spokesman Mr Khaled Mansour told a news conference. "We have heard about factional fighting."
Some 150,000 people have been uprooted and left homeless in and around Mazar by the war and before that by three years of drought.
"What is happening in one camp in Mazar is happening in all the rest, and what is happening in Mazar is also happening all across the northern provinces," said Mr Brendan Paddy of Save the Children.
"I don't even want to think about the body count last night but it will only be the beginning because the aid agencies have still not got the access they need to do their job effectively. There are people with no tents, no warm clothes. We're going to see a lot more child deaths."
The immediate priority is to feed, clothe and shelter millions through the winter. UN experts believe 7 million people are at risk, a humanitarian challenge that dwarfs other recent refugee emergencies such as Kosovo.
The crisis will be most acute amid the rugged mountains of the north where inaccessible indigenous communities are subsisting on a diet of dried mulberries and where half a million uprooted people are freezing in makeshift camps.
The UN's World Food Programme is the main organisation ferrying in and co-ordinating food supplies.
While it is meeting its targets to sustain Kabul and other urban areas, the main problem is one of distribution and access away from the cities.
Triggering opposition in the UN and in Europe as well as the biggest policy difference with the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, on the conduct of the war, Washington has vetoed the deployment of an international force to secure relief supply routes. This means that aid deliveries are liable to be hijacked by brigands brandishing Kalashnikovs.
An even bigger problem is one of access to landlocked Afghanistan from the neighbouring ex-Soviet republics of central Asia, the key to an effective operation across the north.
Tajikistan eased restrictions on aid supplies and lifted some bureaucratic obstacles at the weekend, enabling the Russians to send limited supplies to Kabul. Most international aid is being shipped from Turkmenistan further west, but the road is long and arduous and the supply problems will deepen as the winter worsens.
The main road across the Amu-Darya river bridge from Termez in Uzbekistan, an hour's drive from Mazar, is the vital artery for aid, but the Uzbek dictatorship of President Islam Karimov, the US's new regional ally, refuses to open the bridge for "security reasons".
The Uzbeks are allowing aid supplies to cross the river by barge and under UN auspices.
Around 150 US and French troops have moved to Mazar from their rear base in Uzbekistan over the past week, but none of them is being deployed to secure aid routes.