On his visit this week to Britain, Karzai has gone to great lengths, sometimes comical, not to single out Pakistan for blame. He is a close ally of Musharraf and the two speak regularly. Nevertheless, Karzai has found ways of saying clearly that Pakistan-based terrorists are the source of some of his worst problems.

Karzai, speaking over coffee yesterday in his Kensington hotel, was determined to tell an upbeat story. Trade has soared with neighbouring countries. Poppy production will fall next year. Donors have delivered almost all of the money pledged three years ago, and it has been put to good use.

There is little need for more foreign troops. Those in Afghanistan are used mainly for civilian reconstruction, with a bit of security help for the parliamentary and provincial elections scheduled for September.

Compared with Iraq, he suggests, his country is enviable. “Afghanistan is the world’s success story”, he says.

Some of this is convincing. Trade has given Kabul a source of revenue, and a way of showing Afghans that the country is opening up to the world.

If the elections happen on time, the test is whether warlords and drug barons can appropriate them to consolidate their grip on power. Karzai maintains that many candidates have agreed to surrender weapons, and that the national enthusiasm for elections is undermining the old leaders. Perhaps. Afghanistan’s twin vulnerabilities remain: drugs and terrorism. This year there has been an upsurge in violence in the southeast, and the harvesting of a record opium poppy crop.

Karzai was faultlessly polite in not chiding Britain for failing to get a better grip on the drugs crop in the south, the task it has been assigned within the international coalition.

Next year will be better, he says (so do British officials). Karzai has vetoed the US’s preferred tactic of spraying crops from the air. That has proven efficiency, if it is also provocative. But Karzai argues that the damage to livestock and the farms in general is too great. On terrorism, he does not claim to have an answer. He says that “terrorism was there before Iraq, before 9/11, but because it did not reach the West, we did not call it terrorism”.

Now that we do, what should we do about it? “There are some places called madrassas that are not that. They are training camps for terrorists,” he says. “They have to be closed down by all of us.” Pressed on where they are, he says “Pakistan, Afghanistan, wherever” but finally concedes “Yes” to the question “Are some of these in Pakistan?”

Karzai’s reluctance to offend Musharraf is understandable. The two leaders have, in parallel, taken on the Taleban culture embedded in southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, and the support that it may give to al-Qaeda militants.

Members of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence are known to loathe this change of direction, as well as support for the US and Kabul. Karzai, who has criticised Pakistan in the past for permitting terrorist traffic across the border, hinted at this dissatisfaction with his ally yesterday, saying that “when the attacks stop, then our co-operation (with Pakistan) will be successful”.

A carefully scripted message, then, from a man used to brokering a deal between competing warlords. The question the elections will answer is whether Karzai is President of a liberated country, or simply mayor of the city of Kabul, with uncontrolled wilderness stretching beyond.

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