While conditions have improved in Iraq, Bush admitted that things have not gone so well in Afghanistan, which is being shaken by an increasingly bloody insurgency fueled from safe havens in Pakistan.

"Afghanistan's success is critical to the security of America and our partners in the free world. And for all the good work we have done in that country, it is clear we must do even more," Bush said in a speech to the National Defense University.

His remedy: 4,500 more troops by early next year to bolster what Bush described as a "quiet surge" in US and NATO forces in Afghanistan over the past two years. Bush also called for doubling the size of the Afghan army in five years.

The US troops will include the deployment of a Marine battalion before year-end to replace another battalion that is due to come home, and an army combat brigade in January that originally was supposed to go to Iraq.

Critics said it was not enough, however, warning that the next attack on the United States was more likely to come from the Afghan-Pakistani border regions than Iraq.

"The effort in Afghanistan must move to the forefront and once again become our top priority," said Representative Ike Skelton, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

Currently there are 33,000 US troops in Afghanistan, about 14,000 of them in a 53,000-strong NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

US commanders have said they need at least three more brigades, about 10,000 combat troops, to confront a better trained, increasingly sophisticated "syndicate" of Islamic militants able to move across a rugged, open border.

"To protect the 10 million Afghans, plus the three or so million that are in Kabul, given the numbers that we have here, they just don't work out totally," Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, the number two US commander in Afghanistan, told reporters on Friday.

"You know, it's very difficult for us to be able to do that, given the numbers we have, given the terrain we have," he said.

US forces are not losing the war, but it is "a slow win," Schloesser said.

Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, observed that the Taliban and other insurgent groups have dramatically expanded their presence in Afghanistan since 2004.

Declassified US intelligence and UN maps show that the area of Taliban and insurgent influence or presence doubled between 2004 and 2005, quadrupled between 2005 and 2006, and rose sharply again between 2006 and 2007, Cordesman said.

"At this point in time, US-NATO/ISAF-Afghan forces are simply too weak to deal with a multi-faceted insurgency with a de facto sanctuary along the entire Afghan-Pakistan border," Cordesman wrote in a paper posted on the CSIS website.

Schloesser said there were areas of his sector of eastern Afghanistan where he had "very low numbers of troops."

"I can come in and I can clobber the enemy, but then I can't hold it and stay with the people," he said.

Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has acknowleged commanders' requests for three more brigades but has linked meeting them to deeper troop cuts in Iraq.

"The fight in the east is a very tough fight. General Schloesser has asked for more troops; so has General McKiernan endorsed that. We've got that request and we're looking for ways to answer that," Mullen said less than two weeks ago.

Insurgent attacks, meanwhile, have risen sharply and tactics have expanded to include suicide bombings, roadside explosions, and more recently complex assaults involving larger forces.

With relatively few troops on the ground, US and NATO forces have had to rely on airpower and armed surveillance drones to protect small US and Afghan units operating in treacherous, sometimes unfamiliar terrain.

An unintended consequence has been a series of high-profile incidents in which civilians have been killed in air strikes, taking a toll on public support for the US and international military presence in Afghanistan.

General David McKiernan, ISAF's American commander, asked this week for a review of a military investigation into one such incident in western Afghanistan where Afghan officials said 90 civilians were killed.

The US military, which initially said no civilians were killed in the air strike, later insisted after investigating that no more than seven civilians were killed, along with 30 to 35 Taliban fighters.

Cellphone imagery that surfaced later, and was broadly televised, put that into question.

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