IT WOULD be tempting to say, “Don’t forget Afghanistan” — except that there is little chance of that. The troubled country that had seemed to have achieved an astonishing peace in the past four years is thrusting itself on the world’s attention again.

Reports that Britain is considering shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan appear to spring from official discussions before the terrorist attacks on London last Thursday.

But Tony Blair will want to avoid any suggestion of the “Madrid effect” — an exit from Iraq after the bombing. That would risk suggesting that the bombers had been successful in one of their presumed aims. All the same, there are good reasons why Britain should want to step up its presence in Afghanistan. A lot has gone right since 2001 but, suddenly, quite a bit is going wrong.

Yesterday four suspected Arab terrorists broke out of the huge Bagram airbase, where US forces are holding about 450 prisoners.

On its own that is nothing. But US forces also said that they had found the last body from a four-man special forces team that went missing last month near the Pakistan border. Only one man survived.

The assignment might not have come to light were it not for the loss of a rescue helicopter, and all 16 on board, shot down by militants. That made it the deadliest attack on US forces since the 2001 war.

Some have suggested that the ferocity of the attack on the mission means that it got too close to a prime target — either Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, the Taleban leader.

Perhaps, but that has the air of wishful thinking, trying to discern a glimmer of heroic success in a mission that was an unqualified failure. That attack is the latest in a new bout of insurgency that has killed more than 700 and strained relations between the US and Kabul.

Over the weekend 22 Afghan soldiers were killed, including ten who were beheaded, their bodies dumped near the border with Pakistan.

The US is in dispute with Hamid Karzai’s Government in Kabul over a recent missile strike on a village. The Americans say that they killed militants; Afghans say that many civilians died.

Some of this violence can be explained by the legislative elections on September 18. It is good news that Karzai will meet that deadline, the next scheduled step in Afghanistan’s democratic evolution. But other recent changes are discouraging. Britain is on the defensive within the international coalition for having failed to curb opium growing, after being given responsibility for tackling the drug trade. This year has brought a record crop, although British officials insist that farmers have sown fewer acres for next year’s crop.

The Kabul Government has also accused Pakistan of doing too little to stop militants crossing the border for the elections. But the most worrying sign is Karzai’s sudden fumbling of regional appointments. For two years he has been tough about removing corrupt or incompetent local governors and replacing them with ones noticeably better, if far from perfect.

But this year he has simply resorted to shuffling the pack, particularly in the south and east, the Taleban-sympathising areas least under his control.

That may avoid direct confrontation with those warlords and local barons. But Western officials would have preferred to see new faces brought in — not least as a demonstration of Karzai’s grip on the country.

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