Almost six years after the US toppled the Taliban in what appeared to be a bulldoze of poorly armed fanatics by a well-trained and hi-tech western professional military, the Taliban is making a real comeback. And Afghan President Hamid Karzai says that security had worsened over the past two years, and that the US is no closer to catching Bin Laden.

And those aren’t the only problems:

Mr Karzai is trying to rebuild his war-torn country and strengthen his fragile government while confronting a resurgent Taliban, a booming opium trade, government corruption, mounting deaths of civilians and an al-Qaeda leadership that, US intelligence officials say, has reconstituted itself in the mountainous border territory between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The White House is trying to put on a positive face of the situation as Bush and Karzai meet in Camp David. Gordon Johndroe, National Security Council spokesman, said that Afghanistan presented both “progress and challenges… Afghanistan has come a long way since October 2001, when the US first went in, but there is clearly more work to do.” It’s disheartening to see that so little progress after so much has been sacrificed to aid this poor central asian nation.

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