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While the crisis in Iraq deepens, the Bush administration is also notably edgy about Afghanistan, a country with headaches ranging from a booming drug trade to a resurgent Taliban to political corruption.

The harsh outlook for solving Afghanistan's drug problem was underscored late last month by two reports -- one from the United Nations and one from Washington -- tying the country's record-setting opium trade to corruption and to the Taliban.

Even as those reports made news, President Bush strongly appealed to NATO leaders at a summit in Latvia to send more troops and expand their commitment to squelch the Taliban and help revive Afghanistan's deteriorating economic situation.

In fact, many observers increasingly view Afghanistan as another casualty of the Iraq war. The situation in Kabul is a far cry from what it was four years ago when, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the Bush administration projected confidence that it had largely routed the Taliban, begun to create a democratic government under Hamid Karzai, and laid the foundation for economic reconstruction.

Many foreign-policy analysts, members of Congress, and former intelligence officials say that the Bush administration, when it moved on in early 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein, mistakenly and naively calculated that its mission in Afghanistan was well under control.

"The United States, Karzai, and the international community failed to move quickly enough when the Taliban was on the run to establish a reasonable security environment in which reconstruction could take place," James Dobbins, a Rand director and specialist in postwar reconstruction efforts, told National Journal. "The planning and resources for Iraq began to siphon not only our resources but also our time and attention from Afghanistan."

Dobbins, who until mid-2002 was a special envoy to Afghanistan for the Bush administration, puts much of the blame on the diversion of intelligence, manpower, and money to Iraq. "I think Iraq and Afghanistan have had a pernicious effect on each other," Dobbins explained. "The administration missed a giant window of opportunity in 2002 and 2003. The Afghanistan government failed to provide public services to the population."

Some members of Congress who have watched the evolution of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan echo Dobbins's assessment.

"We did take our eye off the ball in Afghanistan when we applied all our resources and focused our leadership on the invasion of Iraq," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., told National Journal. "I've said we made a fundamental error in squandering a good year or year and a half.... People don't see their lives improving, but their lives getting worse," he said. "The oxygen has been sucked out of everything because of Iraq."

A late-November proposal for a new Marshall Plan to help Afghanistan get back on its feet economically and socially underscored the country's plight. Ironically, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's call for such an effort was not the first plea for major economic help. President Bush made a similar appeal to global leaders in mid-2002, but the response and the results have been dismally inadequate.

"Afghanistan has been at the short end of the economic development stick," said Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of State in the Bush administration. "We did take our eye off Afghanistan and diverted critical resources, and we're now paying a price for it."

In faulting the United States and its allies for their handling of Afghanistan, Rand's Dobbins pointed out that per capita economic assistance in Afghanistan pales beside other recent aid programs for war-ravaged countries. Afghanis have received only about $50 per capita in aid, he said; by comparison the per capita aid level was close to $400 in Kosovo, according to Dobbins, and $800 in Bosnia.

Not surprisingly, the State Department disagrees. "The amount of money that we've put in and the way we've put it in makes sense," said John Gastright Jr., deputy assistant secretary of State for South Asian affairs. "We've had to do things in a more methodical way because of the conditions in the country.... We're dealing with an incredibly impoverished country."

Overall, Gastright said, in the past five years the U.S. has provided $12.5 billion in economic and military aid to Afghanistan. As one measure of success, he pointed out that the country now has 3,000 kilometers of paved roads, up from 50 kilometers five years ago.

But a recent spate of critical reports from American, U.N., and Afghan officials paint a considerably more depressing picture of a country with mounting security and economic troubles. The latest bleak news about the drug trade came from a United Nations and World Bank report, released in late November, that shed further light on Afghanistan's record-breaking opium crop: The country's land under poppy cultivation this year was a staggering 59 percent higher than the previous year, and it yielded 92 percent of world production.

According to the U.N. analysis, Afghan opium production soared to 6,100 tons, which translates into 610 tons of heroin. Equally worrisome, the lion's share of the increase was in the southern province of Helmand, a region known for its lawlessness and its domination by the Taliban. Poppy output was up a whopping 162 percent in the province, accounting for 42 percent of the country's total crop.

Overall, the U.N. reported, Afghanistan's opium production now constitutes about one-third of its total gross domestic product. More alarming still, the study concluded that major narcotics dealers "work closely with sponsors in top government and political positions" in Kabul, and it cited the Interior Ministry as a prime culprit.

Gastright emphasized, however, that the Karzai government is making progress and that it has a 10-year plan to curb opium production. "What it's going to require," he argued, "is staying power."

But other U.S. officials, and even Karzai, appear more alarmed about the situation. In remarks before Congress last month, CIA Director Michael Hayden called the opium boom "the devil's own problem." And in August Karzai commented to other Afghan officials, "Once we thought terrorism was Afghanistan's biggest enemy ... [but now] poppy, its cultivation, and drugs are Afghanistan's major enemy."

Just days after the opium report became public, the Pentagon and the State Department released a long-awaited study concluding that the training of the Afghan police force has been a disaster. After spending $1.1 billion on police training, the report said, the American-led effort can't account for thousands of trucks and other pieces of equipment.

The report estimated that, as of June, most local units had only half of the equipment they were authorized -- and the suspicion is that some of it has been diverted through corruption to the Taliban or even to Al Qaeda. Similarly, the report found that most police units aren't sure how many officers they have, another disturbing sign of poor training and management.

The report drew parallels between the ineffective training of Afghanistan's police -- much of which was contracted out to U.S. company DynCorp -- and the decidedly lackluster record of the police training program in Iraq. The study estimated that rebuilding Afghanistan's police force would cost $600 million a year for an indefinite period.

More broadly, The New York Times reported that a secret CIA review of Afghanistan, finished in late summer before a Washington visit by Karzai, concluded that the government's popularity had been badly undermined by growing public discontent with its performance in key areas. The CIA analysis indicated that the country faced massive security problems outside of Kabul, and that the Afghan government had failed in reconstructing and protecting the country.

The CIA's conclusions were reinforced by yet another study, this one released last month by an Afghan commission, concluding that the country's security outlook had turned much worse -- partly because of a surge in suicide bombings, which until recently had been rare. Suicide bombings have increased fivefold this year, the commission said. Overall, more than 180 American and NATO troops have been killed this year in Afghanistan, a big jump from 2005.

The wide-ranging reports are in sync with warnings from current and former government officials that the international community must give Afghanistan much more attention and aid, both economic and military.

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who traveled to Afghanistan in 2003 and 2005, said she was struck by the country's promise but also its fragility. "Both times, Karzai pleaded for more reconstruction assistance and pointed out that the United States has a history of abandoning Afghanistan at critical times," Collins told National Journal in a phone interview.

Others share Collins's worries and point out that the U.S. and NATO urgently needed to take action to check the country's deterioration.

"Afghanistan is now more at risk than in five years," said Inderfurth, who teaches at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. "We've had a light footprint in Afghanistan, in terms of being undermanned and underfinanced. The spillover of violence and chaos from Iraq is having a major impact on Afghanistan and its security situation."

After the U.S. and NATO routed the Taliban in 2001, he added, the reopening of schools was a big success. Now, by contrast, "schools are being torched, and people are scared."

Inderfurth noted that a British general who leads the NATO forces in Afghanistan warned this fall that NATO had just six more months to demonstrate that it can provide security. "Otherwise, the Taliban will have the upper hand," Inderfurth said.

This year, the U.S. handed over the primary responsibility for security and reconstruction projects in Afghanistan to NATO. The NATO force of 32,000 includes 12,000 U.S. troops; an additional 8,000 American troops are separately handling a variety of counterinsurgency operations along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The NATO forces have had problems rooting out the Taliban, partly because Germany, France, and other countries have placed restrictions on what their forces can do. Some nations have barred offensive efforts against the Taliban, while others have limited their troops to activities in certain areas of Afghanistan.

At the recent NATO summit, Bush stressed the need to lift these curbs and expand the total number of NATO troops in Afghanistan. After Bush's plea, several countries agreed to lift the curbs in emergencies.

Despite the deepening problems, Inderfurth said, many Afghans still have "a reservoir of goodwill" toward the government and the United States.

"But we're losing it," he said, "and there has to be an improvement in people's lives. That's the key indicator of whether we'll succeed or fail in Afghanistan." He added, "The average Afghan sees the government as so weak that it's part of the problem.... We're at the most critical time for Afghanistan since the U.S. military invasion post-9/11."

Looking ahead, Inderfurth calls for action on three fronts: a "long-term commitment" from NATO to help Afghanistan; a strong plan for beefing up police forces throughout the country to "provide security at the local level"; and a willingness to spend the amount of money needed for reconstruction "to take hold." He says, "The money to date still falls far short of what is necessary to demonstrate tangible results."

Dobbins, meanwhile, argues that the key to progress in Afghanistan lies next door, in Pakistan.

"This is an insurgency that is produced predominantly in Pakistan," he contended. In particular Pakistan has to expand its efforts to control the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border, which now are "essentially ungovernable," Dobbins said. "Pakistan needs to extend its writ into those areas" where the Taliban has been recruiting.

He further argues that the war against terrorism would have been more effectively waged "if we had spent a tenth of the money fixing the Pakistan education system that we have in Iraq. Pakistan is the central front in the war against terrorism. It's the core of the problem."

If the U.S., after stabilizing Afghanistan, had moved on to dealing with Pakistan instead of attacking Iraq, he said, "we'd be a lot better off today."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, at least indirectly, added some weight to Dobbins's ideas during a pre-Thanksgiving trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

After a meeting with Musharraf, Blair promised a $1 billion aid package for the two countries. Among the more prominent components was a sizable investment in alternative education programs, intended to counter the influence of the Pakistani religious schools known as madrassas, which have played a large role in breeding Islamic radicalism.

Blair traveled directly from Pakistan to Afghanistan to underscore the stakes in the struggle there and to stress his country's commitment. The new sense of urgency about Afghanistan's stability was also reinforced in Washington on December 6 by the Iraq Study Group, chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton.

In an executive summary, the group noted that the United States should provide more "political, economic, and military support for Afghanistan, including resources that might become available as combat forces are moved out of Iraq."

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