Watching the secretary dissemble in Afghanistan.

It was good of Condoleezza Rice to stop off in Kabul yesterday, on her way to Moscow, to stand beside President Hamid Karzai and pledge the United States' "enduring commitment" to Afghanistan's security and reconstruction.

But before the secretary of state hopped back into the armored car for her short and speedy ride to the airport (where her plane took off in a near-vertical climb to avoid anti-aircraft fire), did she leave behind a pot of gold, a warehouse of weapons and bulldozers, a promise to double (or at least not to cut) American troops—any tangible sign of our allegiance, something that Karzai could point to as proof to his looming doubters that he is the only Afghan leader able to reap goods and favors from the world's wealthy powers?

There was reportedly some background talk on the press plane of a pending increase in aid—beyond President Bush's emergency supplemental request last spring—but nothing major, nothing transformative.

The Bush administration is doing quite a bit already, as is NATO. But the Western alliance signed up to a level of commitment—in troops, money, development assistance, and so forth—well before the recent surge of Taliban attacks, which have been much larger, fiercer, and better-coordinated than anyone had anticipated.

By this fall, the United States is scheduled to cut back its troops from 23,000 to 18,000, while other NATO countries will boost theirs from 11,000 to 18,000. However, on a NATO-sponsored trip to Afghanistan that I took two weeks ago, one clear (though on background) message was that there aren't enough troops for the mission. As for the nascent Afghan National Army, which the United States and Britain are training, it's not ready for prime time, and, even so, the commandant of the training academy—an experienced Afghan general—said his country needs far more than the 70,000 homegrown soldiers that NATO has agreed to finance.

The problems go far beyond a surging Taliban and inadequate troop levels. Afghanistan suffers the legacy of 30 years of horrific conflict and civil war—dire poverty, a bare-bones treasury, massive corruption at all levels of government, rampant crime, a wrecked infrastructure, an economy dependent on opium crops—as well as a rugged, mountainous terrain that may be less hospitable to nation-building than any patch of land on earth.

As noted in my earlier dispatches, NATO's commanders have devised an intriguing strategy—a revival of classic counterinsurgency theory, combined with high-tech communications and more than a dollop of precision air power—but the real question is whether Afghanistan is too far gone for any strategy to matter.

So, Secretary Rice was in a tough spot as she stood there yesterday in Kabul, touting our great friendship with Karzai, pledging not to abandon him like we abandoned Afghanistan before—but, in the end, having no rabbit, or other magic tricks, to pull from her sleeve.

Still, if the point of her visit was to reaffirm our support for Karzai and to extinguish all doubt about America's intentions to stick around for the long haul, she tarnished her credibility by lacing her messages with so much blatant nonsense.

It began with her opening comments at the press conference, in which she thanked Karzai for his "superb leadership," for bringing "unity and hope to the Afghan people and indeed to the region and to the world."