It seemed so easy when alliance forces hostile to the ruling Taliban and spearheaded by U.S. Special Forces rolled into Kabul in late 2001 and toppled the Taliban extreme Islamist regime that had protected the planners and perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 atrocities.

And it was the apparent ease of the conquest of Afghanistan that whetted the appetites of Pentagon and National Security Council hawks for the 2003 war to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq. After all, if overwhelming U.S. forces could remake Afghanistan so easily in contrast to the bleeding ulcer that bled and discredited the Soviet Union for eight years from 1979 to 1987, how hard could Iraq be?

Things have in fact been going from bad to worse in Iraq for a long time. And soon the lesson may be coming home to the American people that --although the casualties have thankfully been much less -- the same thing is happening in Afghanistan. And it has been happening for the same reasons.

As in Iraq, Bush administration policymakers never realized that toppling governments in Afghanistan is actually very easy for a super-power. It is staying there that is hard -- and can easily turn deadly.

The British Empire conquered Afghanistan three times in 80 years -- in 1839-41, in 1878-81 and in 1919. They never stayed. On the first occasion, they actually tried to. And they lost their entire army. Out of a force of 4,000 men manning the British garrison in Kabul in 1842, only a single one survived. The British never made the mistake of trying to stay there again.

In December 1979, the Soviets made the same mistake, and it set off the decline and fall of the communist empire. They too found it easy to take Kabul. They literally did so overnight. Fighting the guerilla war that erupted against them afterwards did not prove so easy. Over the next decade, 15,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives there and the Soviets totally lost.

For Afghanistan is not and never has been a coherent country governed even by the kind of tyrannical but effective government that Saddam and his Second Baath Republic maintained for 35 years over the peoples of Iraq.

It remains a collection of tribes divided along broader ethnic lines in broad, occasionally fluid but usually predictable alliances. The people are overwhelmingly rural subsistence farmers and traditionally Islamic. Historically, they have been prone to embrace militant and extreme fundamentalist Islamic movements.

The Bush administration's efforts at nation-building and the exporting of instant democracy -- just add democratic ideology, hot water and stir -- far from stabilizing the country, has inflamed increasing sections of it against the United States and its NATO allies operating there.

First, the very attempt to set up an effective centralized government under President Hamid Karzai has created the very pathology it was intended to prevent. It has threatened the traditional political feudal ecology of Afghanistan and prompted many tribal groups that might have remained passive if left alone and bribed separately -- the traditional British imperial recipe for maintaining peace there -- into flocking to the support of the revived Taliban and their Pushtun allies.

Second, the U.S. insistence on democracy, human rights and equal rights for woman has outraged traditional Muslims including many who loathed the Taliban and were delighted to see them go four and half years ago. As happened in a quicker and more dramatically violent way in Iraq, the presence of U.S. and allied NATO forces presented different Afghan groups with an obviously culturally and religiously alien intrusive enemy that it was popular and easy to react against.

Third, the determined efforts by U.S. forces to eliminate the growing of opium threatened not just the livelihood but the physical existence of hundreds of thousands of Afghan peasants and their families. Opium for the drug trade is by far the most profitable crop in Afghanistan and for a society of subsistence farmers living on the margins of survival, nothing could be more threatening than armies of foreign soldiers from around the world threatening their best means of feeding their children.

None of these underlying conditions was given serious consideration by U.S. policymakers. The U.S. obsession with al-Qaida and the Sunni insurgency in Iraq also put Afghan policy and resources for taming the country very much on the back-burner in Washington.

The U.S. government over the past four years has not devoted any serious financial or intellectual resources to Afghan planning. The current ominous escalation in violence there against undermanned, poorly equipped and poorly supplied NATO forces is the result. Only worse news can be expected in the months ahead.

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