Comment & analysis / Editorial comment - No time to walk away

If the world needed a new reason of self-interest to stay engaged in Afghanistan, it is that the country now accounts for nearly 90 per cent of global opium production. But the original reason still holds good. The attacks of 9/11 showed how the west's negligence, in letting post-Soviet Afghanistan slide into a Taliban state and haven for al-Qaeda terrorists, can savagely rebound on it.