Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spent a day this week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, meeting with African leaders to try to encourage progress on a wide range of the continent's issues. Too bad she couldn't carve out some real time to show her interest in solving Africa's problems.

There is an argument that says Ms. Rice should now concentrate her efforts on making President Bush's belated Middle East peace effort, launched at Annapolis late last month, come to something. Yet her responsibilities as secretary of state are substantially broader than that and include Africa. Its problems are formidable.

They include the continuing collapse of law and order in Somalia, fostered when the United States backed an Ethiopian invasion there in 2006, overthrowing an Islamic Courts government, the first effective one there since 1991. Ethiopia itself and Eritrea continue to threaten to renew warfare between them in a boundary dispute. Fighting continues in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between the government of President Joseph Kabila, who visited Washington in October, and ethnic rebels led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda in the east of the country.

Sudan remains the worst problem, with conflict and major human suffering continuing in its western Darfur region and its 2005 north-south agreement newly at risk. Efforts to achieve peace in Darfur are completely snagged. A plethora of armed rebel groups, financed by their successful monetization of humanitarian aid, continue to resist mediation -- among themselves and with the Khartoum government and its militias.

Ms. Rice breezed through Addis on Wednesday on her way to a NATO meeting in Brussels, Belgium. She met with some African representatives; the Sudanese government did not bother to send anyone.

But then the United States does not have much capital in Africa at the moment. Its only significant innovation there during the Bush years, apart from supporting the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, was the installation and expansion of a military base in Djibouti, the former French Somaliland, with some 1,800 U.S. troops, and the creation of a new, long-needed U.S. Africa Command to parallel other U.S. regional commands. Whether it was bad marketing or basic suspicion of U.S. intentions, some African countries have expressed themselves as very wary of this overly military U.S. attention to Africa.

Ms. Rice probably got some decent briefings on African problems in Addis, but one day of such attention inevitably has little impact on what occurs in such knotty problems as Somalia, the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea present. There continue to be rumors of a planned presidential visit to Africa. If it comes about, let's hope Mr. Bush can give the continent more than a day.