Last week, my column questioned whether we are losing in the "other front" of the war on terror, Afghanistan.  While there are many existential difficulties in Afghanistan that persist unchanged, recent setbacks have occurred for two central reasons—a shifting reliance on NATO forces and increased freedom of movement for insurgents in the Pakistani tribal areas.  Before explaining these reasons, I am going to describe the changes that have taken place since Afghanistan established its first democratically elected government with Coalition and U.S. help in 2004 and 2005.

There has been a significant increase in insurgent activity in Afghanistan across a variety of metrics. Direct and indirect attacks almost tripled from 2005 to 2006. Direct attacks, involving direct rifle or machine-gun fire, increased to about 4,500 attacks in 2006 from about 1,500 in 2005. Indirect attacks, which consist mostly of rockets, but include mortars as well, increased from almost 600 to over 1,500. Improvised explosive device attacks doubled from almost 800 incidents to over 1,600. At the same time, the International Security Assistance Force was able to kill over 250 IED operators, including fifty cell leaders. Attacks on the international military almost tripled, going from over 1,000 in 2005 to almost 2,900 in 2006. Attacks on Afghan forces almost quadrupled, perhaps in part to the nascent expansion of these forces. There were 830 attacks on Afghan forces in 2005, but in 2006, this number increased to over 3,500. Finally, suicide attacks, which had not been as prevalent in Afghanistan as they have in the Middle East, increased by more than six times: 27 in 2005 to 139 in 2006, killing 15 coalition soldiers and 206 Afghan civilians, and wounding 460 Afghans. The year also resulted in a major increase in local fighters recruited in remote areas where the government of Afghanistan holds little sway.

The limits of NATO's ability to operate in a high-stress combat environment have been made clear through the experience in Afghanistan. The Bush Administration, and particularly the Rumsfeld Defense Department, received strong criticism after their decision in 2001 to invade Afghanistan with an ad hoc coalition rather than accepting the offer of NATO allies to mobilize the collective security alliance for the invasion. Many detractors suggested that it was a case of cowboy diplomacy needlessly snubbing allies. This is perhaps an overstatement, but I do agree with the critics that the more difficult call for allies in Iraq might have gone more easily had there been a greater sense of cooperation in Afghanistan when it had been offered. On the tactical and operational level, however, the decision to avoid a NATO command structure has been validated as extremely beneficial.

Caveats restricting the soldiers' responses under certain conditions prevent many of the allied nation soldiers from responding to the most critical situations in the country, or from responding in a timely manner. These issues threaten the capability for good work of the entire international community in Afghanistan. NATO's Undersecretary for Political Affairs, R. Nicholas Burns, noted in 2007 that the viability of the entire organization was threatened by this ineffectiveness, comparing it to failures in Kosovo that NATO leaders vowed never to repeat. He stated, "When you have 26 allies in Afghanistan and you have four countries doing the majority of the fighting—Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States—it is right for us to ask the other allies to make a greater effort to remove the military restrictions so that everybody can be called upon to make the kind of sacrifices that need to be made." Thus, the divided command structure and the thousands of soldiers ill-equipped, unready, or unable to get into the fight have doubtlessly contributed to the Taliban's resurgence.

More important than the deficiencies of NATO is the increased sanctuary that threat groups were able to find in the Northwest Frontier Province, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Baluchistan. The Pakistani government, which had earlier been engaged (if not entirely effective) in patrolling the wild area of the country, has retrenched. The most notable accomplishment of the Pakistani military was the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003. Mohammed was the number three man in al Qaeda and responsible for planning both the 9-11 attacks and the earlier 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and is currently being held in U.S. custody.

The remote border area of Pakistan has never been controlled by any government. The British failed to win full control over this mountainous and ethnically Pashtun region in the colonial times, and Pakistan has never asserted full control over it either. The area has retained some degree of autonomy under the Pakistani system of government, and most of the Pashtun tribal leaders consider themselves independent and do not recognize the Pakistani government's authority, nor the border separating them from the Pashtun lands in Afghanistan.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has tried to find a balance between supporting the Americans in the Global War on Terror and arousing his own downfall in a country prone to extremism. Having survived numerous assassination attempts, some coming perilously close to ending his life, President Musharraf cannot risk too much in supporting the war. He revealed the pressure in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, relating that the United States had made it abundantly clear that he must abandon the Taliban and support the American effort: "In what has to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, [the then Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage . . . told the director general [of the ISID] not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age."

With this double bind, Musharraf has walked a fine line. The Pakistani military had been engaged in a conflict with Pashtun forces led by former leaders of the Taliban government in the border region. Facing impressive battlefield victories by the Pashtun fighters and the manifest diminishing American power demonstrated in both Afghanistan and Iraq throughout 2006, the president extended a peace agreement with tribal leaders in North Waziristan Agency on September 5, 2006. The agreement required that Taliban-associated leaders in the agency no longer support foreign fighters and no longer conduct movements into Afghanistan. There was little reason to believe that the militants will follow the treaty, given that there are no enforcement mechanisms and the Taliban's military leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, is the senior figure of authority in the agency. Haqqani and other Taliban leaders have essentially established a state-within-a-state, calling their realm the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan and ruling with the harsh justice of the former Taliban regime, strictly enforcing their interpretation of sharia law and beheading offenders.  Recently, the peace treaty has fallen apart, and the Pakistani government has once again reasserted pressure in the area.  The Taliban fighters, however, are once again pressing the Pakistani military and proving themselves strong opponents on the battlefield.

In 2006, the madrassa bases in Pakistan seem to have been able to provide even better staging areas for incursions into neighboring Afghanistan than before, and the international forces under NATO command have not demonstrated the readiness to confront the challenge. In particular, the situation in Pakistan does not seem likely to improve soon with the Pakistani withdrawal from Waziristan. With intelligence indications of plans for a major spring offensive to be launched from Pakistan, the U.S....