President Hamid Karzai admitted yesterday that his government and the US-led Nato mission had done "terribly badly" in providing security to Afghans, as the tenth anniversary passed of the invasion that overthrew the Taliban.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has given private security firms working in Afghanistan four months to end their operations. Karzai has repeatedly called for banning private security companies, saying they undermine government security forces. "Today the president is going to issue a four-month deadline for the dissolution of private security companies," Waheed Omer, Karzai's spokesman, said on Monday.

Afghan leader Hamid Karzai has opened an international conference in Kabul, renewing a call for his country to control its own security by 2014. Afghanistan had not yet achieved good governance, he admitted, adding its allies faced 'a vicious common enemy'.

The Afghan president enjoys little support in "strategically important" areas of the country, a US defence department report has concluded just weeks before Hamid Karzai is due to visit Washington. In what the Pentagon called a "sober" assessment of its progress in Afghanistan, it concluded on Wednesday that violence was up nearly 90 per cent on levels the previous year.

The commander of coalition and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, says the deterioration of the security situation in the country, which he cited four months ago, has stopped. The general says with the revised strategy President Barack Obama announced in December and more allied troops flowing in, there is an "inevitability" about the Afghan and coalition effort to take