Terrorism remains an ever-present threat. Opium production is spreading. Large parts of the country’s infrastructure are in tatters and United Nations targets for improving basic services such as education and water will not be met.

Unless the Afghan Government delivers improvements the people could lose faith in their nascent democracy, according to an assessment by the Department for International Development .

The report was published shortly before the start in Kabul yesterday of the campaign for next month’s national assembly and provincial council elections.

A total of 5,800 candidates are running for office, of whom 582 are women, and a huge security operation is planned to stop terrorists disrupting the process. Officials hope that the elections will lead to a more stable and peaceful Afghanistan, but the DfID’s Interim Strategy on Afghanistan says that the obstacles are immense.

It says: “The political consensus is unstable, with continued insurgency in parts of the country and terrorism an ever-present threat. Governance problems — notably high corruption, limited capacity and dysfunctional institutions — affect everything.

“The drugs trade is a major threat to the rule of law. Afghanistan’s security, reconstruction and political challenges are inextricably interlinked. The risks of failure are real and worrying.”

A UN drug report in June said that cultivation of the opium poppy had risen from 80,000 to 131,000 hectares last year, and the DfID fears a bumper harvest next year. The report says: “Cultivation is moving to new provinces and without a sustained and integrated Afghan-led effort to consolidate progress, may increase further in 2006.”

Britain is leading the international poppy eradication drive, and one British intelligence anti-narcotics specialist said that it could take 20 years to break the country’s heroin business. He said: “If we fail to deal with the drugs challenge, it will spread terrorism and regional instability, which will undermine all the work the international community is trying to do in Afghanistan.”

The DfID said that Afghanistan “is unlikely to achieve any of the millennium development goals by 2015” — eight UN targets such as universal primary education and the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

The report said that there had been “remarkable progress” since 2001 with 3.5 million returned refugees, 60,000 former combatants disarmed and almost 2,000 schools built or refurbished. But three out of five Afghan girls do not attend school, life expectancy is 45 and one in five children die before five years of age.

The report adds: “Large parts of Afghanistan’s infrastructure are in tatters; in rural areas it has never been developed. The vast majority of Afghans do not have access to electricity or safe water. For some mountainous villages, the nearest road is two weeks’ walk away.”

Economic growth has slowed from the initial surge of 29 per cent in 2002 to 16 per cent in 2003 and 8 per cent in 2004.

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