U.S. troops, including 3,500 from the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks, are continuing to bear down on Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists.

After U.S. Marines swept through what had been a Taliban stronghold, the ground commander in Afghanistan, Army Maj. Gen. Eric Olson, told them: "Never again can they use that place as a sanctuary." Olson also commands the 25th Division.

On the down side, Taliban extremists remain violent and are seeking to disrupt the coming election. Al-Qaida terrorists led by Osama bin Laden, who is still at large, are struggling to take advantage of the turbulence caused by the Taliban. Warlords and militias remain an even more serious threat to the emerging central government.

And the most productive trade in the economy is the growing of opium. A bumper crop is expected this year, and its heroin derivative has already started flooding markets in the West.

In sum, says a U.S. military officer who has recently returned from Afghanistan: "It's a tenuous balance."

The destruction of war has been part of Afghan life since the third century before Christ, when Alexander the Great marched into Afghanistan. The Afghans have fought Huns, Persians, Mongols, Russians and the British. The Afghans finally drove the British out in 1921.

Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, addressed the issue of ongoing militancy in his country during a talk with reporters on Monday. He plans to take part in the country's October elections. AP library photo

When they were not resisting foreign invaders, Afghans quarreled among themselves. The last time they had anything resembling a unified country was early in the 19th century. More recently, the emergence in 1994 of the Taliban has been the foremost cause of disorder.

Between the war with the Russians and the brutality of the Taliban, more than 5 million Afghans fled. Since U.S. forces routed the Taliban in late 2001, some 2 million Afghans have returned from Pakistan and 900,000 from Iran.

Another 500,000 displaced people in Afghanistan itself have gone home.

About 1.6 million refugees are still in Pakistan and 800,000 are in Iran.

Of the estimated 9.5 million eligible voters in Afghanistan, the United Nations says 80 percent have registered. Of those, 40 percent are women — this in a land where Taliban fanatics forbade them to work or go to school. The 2.3 million refugees in Pakistan and Iran also will be eligible to vote.

The incumbent president, Hamid Karzai, and a powerful warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, are the most prominent contenders in a field of 23 candidates. If neither gets 50 percent of the votes on Oct. 9, a runoff will follow.

Whether this experiment in governance will succeed remains to be seen.

Although Karzai has begun to rein in the warlords, he says their armies are more of a threat to Afghanistan's future than the Taliban. "The frustration that we have in this country is that progress has sometimes been stopped by private militias, life has been threatened by private militias, so it should not be tolerated," he told the New York Times.

A faint sign of Afghan recovery: There is talk of rebuilding the two massive Buddhist statues carved out of a mountainside in Bamiyan province 17 centuries ago, a pre-Islamic period when Buddhism flourished in Afghanistan. The statues were destroyed by the Taliban three years ago.

It would be costly but archaeologists say it could be done and the project would provide work for Afghans.

The Bamiyan governor, Mohammed Rahim Ali Yar, was quoted in the South Asian Media Net: "The Buddhas were a kind of symbol of our history and culture, something that introduced us to the world. We are less without them."