Karzai pleads with US not to abandon Afghanistan

The United Nations has suspended aid operations in parts of Afghanistan because of fighting between warlords and generally dangerous conditions, highlighting the weakness of the American-backed transitional government.

The suspension came as the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, prepared to meet George Bush in Washington to urge America not to repeat the mistakes of history by abandoning Afghanistan.

Mr Karzai's appeal coincides with warnings from Russia ­ perennially worried by Islamic fundamentalism on its southern flank ­ that Taliban and al-Qa'ida leaders were "alive and well", continuing to plan attacks and receiving funding. Sergei Ivanov, the Russian Defence Minister, said on a trip to Azerbaijan that there had to be "unflagging efforts to bring order to the much-suffering land of Afghanistan".

There are deep fears in Mr Karzai's administration and among its supporters that an American invasion of Iraq will lead to a fall in international support for Afghanistan long before the task of establishing a strong central government, let alone securing peace and reconstructing the shattered country, is complete.

"Don't forget us if Iraq happens," Mr Karzai told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. "Whatever you do in Iraq should not reduce your attention on Afghanistan ... If you leave the whole thing to us, to fight again, it will be repeating the mistakes the US made during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan."

He was sitting at a table with US secret service agents posted at each end ­ a reflection of the scale of the security operation that attends the US-backed Afghan leader everywhere he goes.

He also spoke of Afghan-istan's progress and said the country would "stand on its own feet" in two to four years, a remark that will astonish some of the international agencies trying to achieve that objective. Fifteen months after the ousting of the Taliban, the Karzai government has no control over huge areas of the country. The American and German-led efforts to help to create, respectively, a national army and a national police force, are still in their infancy. So is the establishment of an effective national infrastructure. Roads and communications are poor. The country is awash with hundreds of thousands of firearms and mines.

In northern Afghanistan, at least six people have reportedly been killed in recent fighting between militias in the hire of Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ustad Atta Mohammed.

Manoel de Almeida e Silva, the UN chief spokesman in Kabul, said work had ceased in the Gosfandi district in the north. He also said that aid programmes in three districts in the southern province of Zabul had been halted because of security risks.