I found myself among British troops -- "Tommies" in [Rudyard Kipling]'s parlance -- some weeks ago while travelling through Afghanistan with a group of journalists and academics. We toured the headquarters of the NATO force tasked with stabilization and reconstruction before proceeding down to the restive Kandahar province, where 2,300 Canadians toil alongside American, Dutch and British forces.

Yet another Catch-22 involved the drug trade. NATO forces are aware that the cultivation of poppies provides sustenance for poor Afghan farmers and their families. But the conversion of the crops into raw opium also empowers the drug lords and the Taliban who tax the harvest. Crop eradication -- once enthusiastically encouraged by donor nations -- is now quietly being discouraged on the grounds that it will drive farmers into the arms of the insurgents. Not that they would adopt the Taliban's fundamentalist leanings, so raw are the memories of the former's half-decade of misrule. Rather, NATO officials sheepishly admitted that in the absence of alternative livelihoods, farmers might agree to become "Taliban for a day." In return for a few U.S. dollars, these unfortunate men might agree to a Taliban request to plant an explosive device on a road travelled by coalition troops.

Our late arrival in Kandahar was a metaphor for NATO's push to the south. Four years after the Taliban had been deposed, only recently had international troops and their provincial reconstruction teams arrived on site. No other province was so susceptible to Taliban influence, and yet the international community had dithered in extending its hand.