NATO has agreed to raise the strength of ISAF, the peacekeeping International Security Assistance Force, from 9,000 to 15,000 troops by early 2006. The aim, according to NATO experts, is to extend ISAF's reach. Currently, ISAF maintains security in the capital, Kabul, and has detachments in the north and west of the country.

Under the expansion plan British, Dutch, and Canadian troops will move into the south, including Helmand province, a notorious Taliban hotbed and a center of opium production. Germany will take over the more stable north, and the Italians and the Spaniards will establish bases in the west.

There lies the rub, or rather two rubs. The first is that ISAF troops are moving into areas - notably the south - where they are likely to come into more than occasional contact with Taliban fighters, and that exposes them to more danger, as well as raising questions about the role they are supposed to have.

The second is the current debate over a U.S. proposal to merge ISAF with Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S.-led counter-insurgency operation, which raises even larger questions about NATO's peacekeeping role in Afghanistan. This is the operation that has been looking for Osama bin Laden and members of his al-Qaida terrorist organization since the end of the Afghan war in 2001, and fighting the stubborn remnants of the Taliban.

France, Germany, and Spain rejected the U.S. proposal when Washington first made it a year ago, and the argument has dragged on within the Atlantic Alliance ever since. European diplomats in Washington told United Press International Saturday that some other NATO members are also opposed, but quietly, letting France run the main interference.

One objection is that the merger will change how ISAF is perceived by Afghans. Force components work with Afghan police and the emerging armed forces in maintaining security. ISAF officers claim to receive a high level of cooperation from ordinary Afghans.

The U.S.-led alliance in Operation Enduring Freedom is engaged in an ongoing offensive involving fighting in villages where Taliban or terrorist suspects were hiding, and the collateral damage from ground battles and air strikes has often included innocent villagers and their property.

Another problem for the French and others was that the merged force would put the entire operation in Afghanistan under U.S. command, the diplomats said. Still a resolution is important to Washington because it is expected to make possible the withdrawal of as many as 4,000 U.S. soldiers. On Friday a NATO official in Brussels was quoted as saying, "We are moving towards consensus. There is broad agreement on command arrangements."

As it now stands the consensus formula is for the ISAF commander to have three deputies - one for peacekeeping work, which includes training the new Afghan police and army, one for air operations, and one for "security." The last deputy will report to the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom.

More than 1,000 people have been killed this year in the bloodiest Taliban-linked fighting since the war. Most were militants, but 50 U.S. soldiers were also among the dead. The new arrangement would preserve some separation between ISAF and Enduring Freedom: sadly, it would also ensure that the main allied casualties would continue to be Americans.

The constant pressure on Taliban did have one important result: the Islamist insurgents failed in their vow to disrupt the Sept 18 parliamentary elections. They managed, however, to infiltrate the democratic system. The results show that Islamic religious clerics and former Islamist fighters -- including four former Taliban commanders -- will occupy more than half the seats, according to a recent New York Times report.

The success of conservatives in the Wolesi Jirga, or lower house of the Afghan parliament, is an indication of the residual power of fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan almost five years after the Taliban regime was forced out of office.

But the election result, according to analysts, reflects the struggle going on between conservative religious leaders and progressive Afghans who had hoped that the departure of the Taliban would open the way to modernizing their country.

This conflict is illustrated by two seemingly contradictory developments. Women took 68 parliamentary seats -- slightly more than the 25 percent of the seats allocated under the new electoral system. But last month Al Mohaqiq Nasab, the male editor of a women's rights magazine in Afghanistan, was sentenced to two years in jail for challenging the harsh punishment prescribed by the Islamic Sharia law.

The idea of a male heading such a publication may seem strange to Western feminists, but that's the least of Nasab's problems. He had been charged with blasphemy for questioning such punishments as 100 lashes for adultery, and death by stoning for converting from Islam to another religion. The prosecutor had asked for the death sentence for Nasab.

The Nasab case caused a clash between the Afghan minister of culture and the conservative judges trying the case. He was arrested and put on trial at the insistence of Mohaluddin Baluch, President Hamid Karzai's influential special religion adviser, after a group of religious figures objected to the contents of two of his articles in the publication Hoqooq+Zan (Women's Rights). He was the first journalist convicted for blasphemy by a Kabul court since the fall of the Taliban.

Local law bans comments deemed insulting to Islam, but legislation regulating the Afghan media is supposed to protect journalists from such summary action. Nasab's case -- reports from Kabul said -- should first have gone before a government-appointed media commission. The fact that it did not reflects the rising influence of the religious authorities, and the uphill struggle to secularize the country.

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