It was a particularly bloody weekend (Nov. 19-20) in Afghanistan. US and Afghan forces were caught up in fierce firefights with al-Qaeda-backed Taliban insurgents in southern Afghanistan's bandit country.
Police reportedly seized two tonnes of opium after a gun-battle with traffickers south of Kandahar.
A suicide bomber drove a vehicle packed with explosives into a US military convoy in the Girishk district of southern Helmand Province. And an Indian reconstruction worker was kidnapped with three others by the Taliban in Nimroz.
The bigger problem for US and NATO forces, and for international efforts to rebuild the war-shattered country is that such incidents are far from rare.
On the contrary, they are becoming the daily norm four years after the US-led `victory' over the Taliban regime -- and they are not confined to the still lawless south and east.
Eight people were killed two weeks ago when suicide bombers targeted peacekeepers in Kabul.
The government of President Hamid Karzai blamed al-Qaeda and warned more Iraq-style suicide attacks may be on the way.
On Nov. 18, a Portuguese member of NATO's International Security and Assistance Force was killed and three others were wounded by an explosion in Bagrami, east of the capital.
Christina Rocca, a US assistant secretary of state, said during a visit to neighboring Pakistan that despite the rising violence, which is now at its highest level since 2001, the Bush administration remained confident about Afghanistan's future.
Rocca also predicted Osama bin Laden would be brought to justice, sooner or later.
"Obviously we will continue to look for him and one day we will find him," she said.
But such US optimism looks less well-founded with each day that passes. And there may be more than a touch of self-interest in Washington's upbeat assessments.
Up to 4,000 US troops are expected to be pulled out of southern Afghanistan by Washington early next year, reducing the overall force levels of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in line with hoped for withdrawals in Iraq.
Although US forces will continue to hunt al-Qaeda leaders, the Bush administration is also reducing bilateral assistance and reconstruction aid to Afghanistan.
Part of the plan is to hand over greater responsibility to an expanded, British-led NATO force in the south.
But another objective appears to be US President George W. Bush's wish to declare Afghanistan a democratic success story even if the facts on the ground tell a different story.
September's parliamentary elections were hailed by the White House as another giant step towards Afghanistan's rehabilitation following the presidential polls that brought the pro-Western Karzai to power. And the vote was certainly a landmark event in some respects. Women candidates, banned from public life by the Taliban, won 68 of the 249 seats in the new assembly.
But other victorious candidates included former Taliban commanders, regional warlords, drug traffickers and Islamic fundamentalists.
The country's human rights commission said about a third of the new members of parliament had connections with the mujahidin, the `holy warriors' who fought the Soviet occupation and then the disastrous civil war that ensued.
How committed this new parliament will be to supporting Karzai and Bush's democratic agenda is open to question.
Western efforts to suppress the Afghan opium trade, the source of most of Europe's heroin supplies, have been a failure so far.
Production fell during the Taliban's rule but has risen sharply since 2001. Efforts to encourage replacement crops have made scant progress. And US commanders, concentrating on their `war on terror,' have not made the problem a priority.
Michael Ancram, the UK Conservative opposition's defense spokesman, said the other week that 60 percent of the Afghan economy was drug-based.
"There will never be stability until that changes," he said.
The worry for NATO troops deploying to Helmand and Kandahar in the south, the heartland of the opium business that straddles key transportation routes linking Pakistan and Iran, is that serious attempts at eradication will inevitably fuel the escalating conflict.
A series of recent investigations by US media, notably the New York Times and the Washington Post, has also established that Bush administration reconstruction programs in Afghanistan, like their equivalents in Iraq, have been plagued by delays, extraordinary cost over-runs, incompetence and alleged corruption.
Of 1,000 US-funded buildings due for completion by the end of last year, only 138 had been turned over to the Afghan government by the beginning of this month.
But security -- or the lack of it -- continues to override all other concerns while simultaneously hampering Afghanistan's political and economic progress.
With Mullah Omar, the fugitive Taliban leader, threatening intensifying jihad against "all infidel forces," worries are growing in Britain and allied countries about the situation their troops will face next spring, especially in the south, as the US begins to pull back.
The basic question, as yet unanswered, is what are peacekeepers supposed to do when there is no peace to keep?
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