Only half finished? Didn’t a U.S.-led coalition overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan and chase out Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist gang? And didn’t the United States, in three weeks, almost single-handedly destroy Saddam’s dictatorship in Iraq?

They did, spectacularly. But Osama has slipped away and his worldwide network is not finished. And where is Saddam, perhaps killed or maybe hiding out in Syria – or lolling in a posh villa in Belarus after being rescued by charter jet the day Baghdad fell, if you can believe a breathless account by an Israeli-based newsletter. The toughest part of the job is yet to come. Here are some of the main elements left to be done before the United States can leave the region with a sense of accomplishment:

. Stabilizing Afghanistan. The government that the United States helped put in place actually controls little beyond the capital, Kabul. Warlords fight over the rest of the country and threaten the new government and the remaining U.S. garrison. Remnants of the Taliban are roaming back and forth between the Afghan mountains and cross-border hideouts in Pakistan.

. Establishing the promised peaceful, democratic, prosperous Iraq. The majority Shiites, shouting for Americans to go home, plan to take over the government and the economy and set up an Islamic “republic” that would threaten the state of Israel and could provide a new haven for al-Qaida. The Pentagon

is trying to head off such a possibility by sending in trained expatriate administrators, but most of them don’t want their names mentioned for fear of assassination. Any new government supported by the United States will be tarred as a puppet. A special case is the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, where Saddam spent 20 years driving out Kurdish residents and replacing them with subsidized Arabs. The Kurds are trying to grab back their houses and lands, and the Arabs are resisting. Both, with some justification, assert property rights.

. Getting Iraqi oil back into production. Even after concluding a likely fight in the United Nations Security Council over how to wind up the U.N.’s multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food operation, the decrepit oil industry needs rehabilitation and its revenues will fall far short of paying off the Saddam regime’s debts and financing national reconstruction. And much of the rest of the world will continue to believe that the war was an American grab for Iraq’s oil.

. Protecting America against further terrorist attacks, which, after all, was the immediate reason for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Among the many safeguards yet to be financed and undertaken is inspecting the flood of shipping containers that enter this country every day. And, as a local threat, what about protecting against terrorist attack the cruise ships that soon will come calling at Bar Harbor?

Bush administration officials speak of being able to leave within somewhere between three months and two years. Helping build democratic and viable governments and economies in Germany and Japan was spectacularly successful, but it took many years and we still have thousands of troops in those two countries. A big job lies ahead. It is nowhere near over.