AL-QAEDA has always had a penchant for attempting terrorist attacks as Christmas approaches when - usually - the West lets its guard down. At the end of 1999, two years before the Twin Towers massacre, an al-Qaeda unit under the orders of Abu Zubaydah, bin Laden’s senior field commander, ordered a suicide attack on Los Angeles International Airport. Fortunately, an alert policeman on the Canadian border discovered the car carrying the explosives and the plot was foiled. Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan earlier this year, but that does not mean the threat from al-Qaeda is any less, as the Prime Minister made clear last night in his Mansion House speech.

Mr Blair’s warning came amid reports of extra measures being taken by police to tackle the terrorist threat, such as the creation of a 250-strong police anti-terror detail at London’s Heathrow Airport, said to include snipers. Nevertheless, the watchword should be prudence rather than panic. Britain lived through nearly 30 years of Provisional IRA bombings without abandoning its way of life. So today, though the potential is worse, given al-Qaeda’s desire to use chemical and biological weapons, we should not be prepared to give into terrorist blackmail either by abandoning civil liberties or by retreating into an over-protected environment. The storm can be weathered.

But this will be a long war. We will only win if we have more patience than have the fanatics. The fact that this will be a long haul also implies that we must have an attention to detail.

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taleban and al-Qaeda. However, there has been limited nation-building in that country since then. True, Kabul is now a vibrant city of music, cinemas, pizza restaurants, beauty salons and traffic jams. Women, forced to hide their lives and faces under the Taleban, have gradually returned to Afghan society. But problems remain.

For instance, peace has prompted hundreds of thousands of refugees to return from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan. Since their homes had been destroyed, many have now crammed into squalid neighbourhoods without running water and electricity - and winter is on its way. Much of the promised western financial aid is yet to appear. And while girls have returned to the schools from which they were barred by the Taleban, Afghan females still live in a society dominated by archaic male attitudes, particularly outside Kabul. Above all, while the writ of the interim government runs in Kabul, much of the rest of the country remains under the domination of warlords who answer only to themselves. The International Security Assistance Force maintains regular patrols in the capital, but hardly elsewhere.

The lesson here is that once upon a time the West forgot Afghanistan after it had helped expel the Soviet invaders. This time, we need to rebuild Afghanistan properly, which is going to include the need to extend the rule of law outside Kabul and provide more extensive economic reconstruction. If not, the second anniversary of the liberation of Kabul might see hope turn to despair and the door opened again to the fanatics.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2002