Afghanistan remains unstable and vulnerable to disintegration as the world prepares to mark the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. The assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai last week, together with a lethal car bomb in Kabul, highlighted the continuing power of the country's warlords, as did reports yesterday that one of their number has been arrested by United States forces.
These events underline the problem of how to bring security to the country. The 4,500 international force is limited to the capital, while the 8,000 US troops remain deployed exclusively in pursuit of the al-Qaeda organisation.
Facing into another winter, Afghanistan is ill-prepared to handle the aftermath of the war earlier this year, despite the genuine political and social progress that has been made after the Taliban regime was defeated. Over one million refugees returning from Pakistan remain to be resettled and many more internally displaced people are in a similar plight.
Pledged international aid has been slow to materialise, partly because donor governments are unhappy with arrangements to disburse it. Work on rebuilding Kabul has hardly begun. There has been little attempt to restore bridges and repair communications, schools and health services in the absence of administrative structures outside the capital. The government appointed by President Karzai is dominated by the northern Tajik group which captured Kabul after the Taliban withdrew; and in any case it has little political purchase elsewhere. Mr Karzai himself is now protected by a US bodyguard.
These problems cannot be tackled until a decision is made to extend the government's remit and international agreement reached to provide a military force that can back it up - if necessary in the face of hostility from regional warlords who would lose power as a result. So far the United States has opposed such an initiative, preferring to concentrate its attention on pursuing al-Qaeda. There are signs of a rethink in Washington, as the potential consequences of longer term instability are realised. But that would require fresh international funding.
Its cost would not be anything like the amounts the US is spending on its own force, which so far has had little success in tracking down the al-Qaeda organisation, despite the predominant US role in toppling the Taliban regime and installing Mr Karzai in power. Afghanistan needs continuing aid and solidarity in tackling these deep-seated problems.