A growing number of experts doubt that the war can be won, while even Obama, who has already dispatched an additional 21,000 reinforcements there, contemplates a further troop increase and completes a strategic review.

On the campaign trail last year, Obama portrayed the war in Afghanistan as the only useful conflict in the war against terrorism. As president, he has called it a "war of necessity."

In March, the Obama administration redefined the war's goals, focusing on fighting Al-Qaeda and its supporters while demonstrating willingness to boost its military effort against a growing insurgency.

On the ground, the situation continues to deteriorate, with August the deadliest month for US forces since the war began in October 2001.

"It's a new strategy. It's the first one -- and I recognize we've been there over eight years," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen told NBC television in August.

"But I also want to say that this is the first time we've really resourced a strategy on both the civilian and military side. So in certain ways, we are starting anew."

Mullen, the top US military officer, has been calling for fighting the "culture of poverty" deemed to favor the Taliban.

"But that (fight against poverty) took decades in just a few square miles of the South Bronx," countered George Will, a conservative columnist writing in The Washington Post who has called for the United States to "get out" of Afghanistan.

Wesley Clark, the former commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, worried about the course of the conflict.

"The similarities to Vietnam are ominous," Clark wrote in the New York Daily News.

"There, too, an insurgency was led and supported from outside the borders of the state in which our troops were fighting. There, too, sanctuaries across international borders stymied US military efforts," the retired general said.

"There, too, broader political-strategic considerations weighed against military expansion of the conflict and forecast further struggles in the region."

Michael O'Hanlon, an expert who favors Obama's offensive strategy in Afghanistan, said critics need to better understand the strategy and developments on the ground.

"All they hear now is word of casualties, of our added troops making no difference so far, of (incumbent President Hamid) Karzai trying to steal the election, et cetera," O'Hanlon said.

"In Vietnam, we lost 5,000 or more Americans a year and the Vietnamese lost hundreds of thousands. In Afghanistan, we are losing 200 to 300 a year and the Afghans are losing a few thousand," the Brookings Institution analyst told AFP.

"However there is one disturbing parallel: the corruption in the respective indigenous governments and their general weakness."

In his commentary, Wesley Clark also drew a dire comparison.

As in Vietnam, "American public support slid away over time as our engagement ratcheted up and casualties mounted," Clark said.

Nearly six in 10 Americans are opposed to the Afghanistan war, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll released this week.

A new front awaits Obama over the next few weeks in Congress, where dissonant voices are heard among fellow majority Democrats.

Obama, for now, enjoys support from a wide array of lawmakers, military officers and commentators. But all agree that the US task in Afghanistan is not only immense, but also immensely uncertain.

earlier related report
US must stay in Afghanistan to defeat Al-Qaeda: chiefs
Top US military chiefs sought Thursday to convince a war-weary public that President Barack Obama's new strategy is working in Afghanistan, saying troops must stay there to defeat Al-Qaeda.

"There is a limited time for us to show that this is working," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters at a Pentagon press conference held as new polls showed American support for the war is waning.

"We are mindful of that, we understand the concerns of many Americans in that area, but we think that we now have the resources and the right approach to start making some headway."

Gates was joined by Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said the fight against Al-Qaeda could not be won if US troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan now as some commentators have advocated.

"There's no way to defeat Al-Qaeda, which is the mission, with just that approach, you can't do it remotely, you can't do it offshore," Mullen said.

"I certainly don't think it's time to leave."

Their comments came two days after General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, submitted a review of America's strategy in Afghanistan widely expected to include a request for more troops.

Gates and Mullen declined to detail the report's findings, which have been forwarded to Obama and are being evaluated by senior members of the military, and insisted the number of troops was not the most important issue.

"What's more important than the number of troops he (McChrystal) may or may not ask for is how he intends to use them. It should come as no surprise to anyone that he intends to use those forces under his command to protect the Afghan people," Mullen said.

"In my view, the numbers that count most are the numbers of Afghans we protect."

But the focus on potential troop deployments is a reflection of declining US public support for the war in Afghanistan.

A CNN poll released Tuesday showed 57 percent of Americans now oppose the war, and 40 percent believe it is not winnable, despite the best efforts of the administration to sell the strategy Obama unveiled earlier this year.

In his first months in office, the president pledged to refocus US attention and resources on Afghanistan, and said America's goal in the country would be to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al-Qaeda."

He also ordered the deployment of 4,000 US troops to help build up the Afghan army, in addition to 17,000 extra troops that had already been promised and an influx of civilian experts to help with development.

Gates emphasized Thursday that those resources were still being deployed in Afghanistan.

"Our new commander appeared on the scene in June. We still do not have all of the forces the president has authorized in Afghanistan yet," he said.

"So we are only now beginning to be in a position to have the assets in place and the strategy or the military approach in place to begin to implement the strategy."

Mullen also called for patience in evaluating the effects of Obama's plan,

"We've got new leadership, new strategy, resources moving in and this approach has got great potential, but its going to take some time to start to turn things."

earlier related report
Outside View: The NATO-Afghanistan dilemma
by Harlan Ullman
Washington (UPI) Sep 2 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has just submitted his first assessment of what needs to be done to turn the tide in that battered and war-torn nation long known as the graveyard of empires dating back to Alexander. While classified, that assessment summarizes the situation as "serious but still winnable." That conclusion is sadly reminiscent of the strategic assessment of the Kaiser's senior advisers in Berlin in the early years of the last century as Europe headed toward war.

"In Paris, the situation in Europe is seen as serious but not yet hopeless." In Berlin, however, "we see conditions as hopeless but not serious." Depending on one's view, Afghanistan vacillates between serious and hopeless.

Afghanistan is not going to bring the world to a cataclysmic war. If the West fails, this will prove at least a major setback for the United States and for NATO and possibly worse. Conceivably, the alliance could become a relic if Afghanistan proves too tough a nut to crack. In the United States, should the Obama administration not produce a workable solution as in the healthcare debate, its political currency will be weaker than the dollar.

At the same time NATO and the White House are reflecting on the McChrystal review, NATO is engaged in producing a new "strategic concept" to chart a future course and hopefully make powerful arguments as to its relevance that can be understood by publics and politicians alike in order to keep the alliance from becoming a relic. Whether the future of Afghanistan and NATO can be integrated and coordinated in fashioning a new strategic concept remains one of the major challenges confronting the 12 "experts" commissioned by the alliance to undertake this effort. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright is the chairman of this group that will report in time for the fall 2010 NATO heads of state summit in Lisbon.

The Obama administration entered office vowing to move Afghanistan from under the shadow of George W. Bush's fixation on Iraq. A strategy called "AFPAK" was written, although the document was more vision and intent than a functioning strategy, and McChrystal was deputized to implement that strategy. Part of his assessment was recommending additional steps to ensure a happier outcome in Afghanistan. The reality is that happy outcomes are not in the cards. The reasons have been sadly obvious for too long no matter how competent our people in Afghanistan are -- and they are.

NATO and Afghanistan must overcome years of neglect. Governance and economic development have been failures. The Karzai government is weak, corrupt and ignored by most Afghans. The low turnout for the past election is a further symptom no matter whether Karzai wins now or in October after the runoff. The insurgency has spread, and NATO casualties rise as operational intensity increases. The standard of living for Afghans remains pitifully low and is probably worsening. Despite all the aid, by most accounts only a nickel or dime of every dollar gets directly to Afghans.

So what can NATO do? The first step is to get an accurate assessment of conditions on the ground. Second is to determine alternate strategies and determine what if any additional resources NATO and its member states are prepared to commit. Third, if that assessment is grim and the resources deemed necessary to turn conditions around cannot be found, is NATO prepared to consider an "exit strategy" however defined?

In full disclosure, since early 2004 this column has been sounding the Afghan alarm with no effect. Now that attention has finally shifted, my conclusion is that it is too late. The NATO experts committee drafting the strategic concept can take the courageous (and some would say politically foolhardy) choice of addressing Afghanistan head on in their considerations. To ignore Afghanistan would have been akin to writing a military strategy in Europe in 1938 with no reference to Hitler. Yet, as former U.S. ambassadors to NATO recognize, to raise Afghanistan could unleash centrifugal forces that will neuter or shatter any semblance of alliance cohesion.

Secretary Albright has been conducting a listening tour in preparation for this important assignment. She has received many fine ideas and recommendations about how to approach this potentially Sisyphean labor. But the toughest and most difficult choice will be Afghanistan and how to address it if at all.

Born in Czechoslovakia before the war and fortunate to escape in time, the secretary fully appreciates how the threat of the Soviet Union coalesced the original signers of the Washington Treaty into creating NATO in 1949. Afghanistan is not in the same universe as Soviet Russia. Yet, its shadow may be as powerful in affecting the future of the alliance in 2010 as Moscow was 60 years ago.

(Harlan Ullman is chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of governments and business.)

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

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