With his fancy hats and fluent English, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan cuts a dashing figure on the international stage. But, while Mr Karzai is a regular at Davos, he keeps a low profile in Afghanistan itself. Holed up in his presidential palace in Kabul, he seemed tired and evasive at a press conference there last week.

Mr Karzai’s erratic behaviour is just one reason for fearing for the future of Afghanistan. The Taliban insurgency is still raging across the country. Suicide attacks are occurring at eight times the rate they were in 2006. Diplomats in Kabul are told not to visit restaurants or markets. Last week an International Monetary Fund report portrayed the Afghan economy as based on opium and aid.

Open bickering has broken out within the international coalition that is trying to shore up Afghanistan. The Canadians, who hold the vital region around Kandahar, are threatening to withdraw their 2,500 troops unless allies send reinforcements. Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has criticised the counterinsurgency efforts of Nato allies.

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As the British party led by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, drove through Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, we all noticed a gigantic queue of people, stretching several blocks. What were people lining up for? Apparently, the attraction was a book fair held on the university grounds. If nothing else, that confirmed Bangladesh’s reputation as an exotic place. But also one with powerful links to Britain. There are some 500,000 British-Bangladeshis - just under 1 per cent of the British population.

But Bangladesh scarcely features on the policy map in Britain, let alone in Washington. In some ways that is odd because the foreign-policy problems posed by Bangladesh are very similar to those posed by Pakistan. Both countries are struggling to restore a democracy that has been marred by feudalism and corruption in the past. Both are threatened by radical Islamism. It is true that Pakistan has nukes and a war on its border (and increasingly within its borders); but then Bangladesh has a claim to fame as a country that is directly threatened by climate change.

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I am now in Kabul, and so are Condi Rice and David Miliband. The "security situation" here is so dicey that the arrival of the American secretary of state and Britain’s foreign secretary could not be advertised in advance. In fact my Foreign Office companions became highly agitated when I mentioned on an "open line" (ie a mobile phone call home) that I was sitting in a motorcade at Kabul airport, with Rice and Miliband in the car ahead, waiting to be swept along to the president’s palace.

The security is so tight that it must be virtually impossible for visiting western dignitaries to form any spontaneous impression of Afghanistan. Rice and Miliband arrived early this morning on an unadvertised flight from London. They were immediately put on a military plane to Kandahar - but did not leave the military base there. Then it was back to Kabul, and a short drive to see President Karzai on a road that had been cleared of all traffic. Then it was time to visit some more troops in a gym at Nato HQ. And that’s it. Condi is off tonight. Miliband is staying for a formal dinner. I’m sure they will have had "frank discussions" with President Karzai. But they must be completely reliant on their diplomats for any impression of how things are going.

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I am in Islamabad, which is perhaps not the ideal place from which to comment on Super Tuesday. But while we still have months and months to go before the Americans actually choose their president, the Pakistani elections are coming up fast - February 18th in fact.

There are three big questions surrounding the vote:

1) Will Musharraf rig the voting? 2) If the opposition win can they form a stable government? 3) Can any government improve the security situation - which means regaining control of the wilder bits of the country and stopping the suicide bombings which are becoming a regular feature of Pakistani life?

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Here is a proposal for the next American president. The US should take the lead in setting up a massive, publicly funded research project to tackle climate change. The American government has, in the past, shown that it is capable of sponsoring pioneering science – from the Manhattan project that produced the atomic bomb to the space programme. Why not apply American energy, money and know-how to a new Manhattan project on global warming?

The secrets of the bomb and space programmes were kept closely guarded for security reasons. But climate change is a security issue for the whole world. So a US-led research project on technologies to tackle global warming could be a much more open and international affair. It would also have to be much more wide-ranging than the bomb or space programmes – sponsoring research on everything from alternative energy to carbon-capture and geo-engineering (such as efforts to create a stratospheric shield in the atmosphere).

The main purpose of any such programme would be to combat the obvious threats posed by climate change. But it would also have the incidental benefit of blunting one of the main sources of global anti-Americanism – the idea that the US is too casual about climate change.

The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.

How appropriate that the French parliament has approved the European Union’s Lisbon treaty in a special session at Versailles. By ignoring public opinion in this way, France’s politicians have proved themselves to be worthy heirs of Louis XIV.

The Lisbon treaty is essentially a repackaging of the European Union constitution that was decisively rejected in a referendum in France in 2005. As a defeated politician once put it - "The people have spoken, the bastards." But the newly-married President Sarkozy is not one to take rejection lying down. He has decided to push through the new treaty, without risking a second referendum. He argues that a second rejection would be disastrous for both France and the European Union.

Some French pro-Europeans are cheekily arguing that the parliamentary vote proves that "France" has had second thoughts. A Mr Giuliani of the Fondation Robert Schuman (I was wondering what had happened to him) is quoted in today’s FT as saying - "The French tasted isolation in Europe in recent years and they didn’t like it." Well, I’m sure Mr Giuliani didn’t like it. But what the French people themselves think, we will never know. Opinion polls show that well over 50% of them would like a second referendum on Lisbon. But France’s political elite is not going to make that mistake again.