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Is Afghanistan ready to take its fate into its own hands? Not yet.

The first thing you notice about the Canadian mission in Afghanistan is how tired people are. At the embassy in Kabul, at the airfield and Provincial Reconstruction Team's camp in Kandahar, even the military's staging base Camp Mirage"”they're all going flat out, working 18-hour days, seven days a week.

The second thing you notice is that everyone vibrates with a sort of high-strung urgency. A lot has been written in recent months about the military surge, thanks to Barack Obama's decision to flood Afghanistan with 30,000 additional troops by summertime. But what you don't get from the papers is a sense of the surge of effort and intensity from everyone involved"”military personnel for sure,...