We already know that some parts of Aghanistan are "secure" and others are "insecure." The critical issue is why. Reading this article, conveniently devoid of historical perspective or context, one would never know that military leaders and many others (including many Dems) were urging Bush and Rumsfeld to realize the magnitude of the nation-building task in Afghanistan and send more troops. But the Administration was determined to do nation-building on the cheap, and sought mainly to secure the area around Kabul and leave the rest of the country to the depredations of the Taliban, warlords, opium traffickers and others. An honest analysis would have connected the dots from this failed Bush-Rumsfeld approach -- which, yes, includes the massive diversion of energy and military resources for the Iraq misadventure -- to the current weakness of the Karzai government and the now-vastly-greater challenge of subduing the Taliban and stabilizing Aghanistan. Please see the following quote from a prescient 2003 article in the Washington Monthly. Alas, the facts on the ground still obtain:

Our biggest failure ther [in Afghanistan] occurred in the mop-up stage, following the flight of the Taliban government. Because we had so few troops on the ground, we failed to cut off and destroy the remnants of al Qaeda--including, most likely, Osama bin Laden himself--as they fled into the lawless mountain regions of the Afghan and Pakistani frontier. Our subsequent efforts at nation-building on the cheap have yielded similar results. Our unwillingness to put many troops on the ground has made a mockery of the president's promise for a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan. The Western-oriented, U.S.-installed president, Hamid Karzai, controls little more than Kabul, and the rest of the country has already drifted back into warlordism.

The point is, if they want to drift back into warlordism they can. It's their country, isn't it? Without the figleaf of 9/11 you wouldn't have a shred of legal cover for your activities.