Some of the same individuals responsible for bringing liberty to postwar Afghanistan are preparing to supervise the same for Iraq, most notably Zalmay Khalilzad, the 52-year-old Afghan-American who was the White House envoy to Afghanistan. Last December, Khalilzad was appointed the president's special envoy and ambassador at large for free Iraqis. Hagel sings Khalilzad's praises but says, "They're stretching him too thin." He even seems to see Khalilzad as a metaphor -- everything's been stretched too thin: "our force structure, our diplomatic structure, we're stretching our people too far. To the breaking point."

Some experts wonder if the U.S. will be able to uphold commitments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Since omitting funding for Afghanistan reconstruction in its 2003 budget, the Bush administration has requested more money for reconstructing Afghanistan in its 2004 budget -- about $850 million (even while it allots maybe a hundred times that for its Iraqi campaign). This includes $150 million in development assistance, $277 million in economic support funds, and $320 million in foreign military financing, among other projects.

But according to Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., chairman of the House Appropriations Foreign Operations Subcommittee, the numbers for all those projects will not be able to be maintained. Bush requested $17 billion in 2004 foreign aid spending, and Kolbe told Congressional Quarterly that he was concerned that this would not be enough -- specifically to create nations out of postwar Afghanistan and postwar Iraq. "It can't stay the same," he said.

Biden says that he and others on his committee have pressed the White House for more funding for Afghanistan, only to have these concerns brushed aside. "We were told, 'We don't need any more in Afghanistan,'" Biden said in February.

But while other commitments push down the U.S. funding for Afghanistan in Washington, the numbers are moving the other way in Kabul. At a March 13 donor conference in Kabul, Karzai said that the $4.5 billion that international donors had pledged to Afghanistan over the next five years wasn't going to be nearly enough. "Our estimate now is probably from $15 billion to $20 billion," he said.

But even if the U.S. had a bottomless bank account and committed it all to Karzai's government, there exist other glaring problems with the way we're waging the peace. The greatest one: a country that has returned to being run by tribal leaders.

On Wednesday, April 2, Barnett Rubin, director of studies at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, returned from an 11-day trip to Afghanistan -- his sixth trip in the last year or so. "There are many positive things taking place there, some of them with the assistance of the United States," Rubin says, "but the basic conditions to make it possible for these efforts to succeed are not there. None of these reform efforts -- writing the new constitution, building the schools -- none of them can succeed if there is not additional security, if power in the country remains in the hands of unaccountable gunmen."

Slightly more than 9,000 American soldiers remain in Afghanistan. Central Command in Florida will not specify how many of these men and women are trying to provide order and how many are still chasing down Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

Either way, all indications seem to be that the country is getting less safe, not more so. On March 27, a water engineer working for the International Committee of the Red Cross was driving in the Uruzgan Province when he was ambushed and shot to death; the Red Cross has since suspended field operations. Two days later in the southern Helmand Province, another ambush killed two U.S. Special Forces soldiers. Rockets were fired at U.S. military bases and the headquarters of the undermanned international peacekeeping force supposedly bringing security to the country.

"Everyone even remotely familiar with Afghanistan knows that Karzai's government controls essentially Kabul and not much else," Hagel says. Hagel, Biden and Senate Foreign Relations Chair Dick Lugar, R-Ind., "have strongly, strongly recommended that the United States put more effort and more manpower in there, because it's going to be required," Hagel says. "There's no other way to do this."

Inside the U.S., the debate over providing more security to Afghanistan has focused on whether the United States should be part of the International Security Assistance Force "and whether we should commit troops," Hagel says. "Not only do we need to, but we're going to have to."

But the Bush administration has so far refused to commit to such efforts. "We had a hearing [Tuesday] with a NATO official and we discussed what the NATO role should be, and we talked about ISAF forces," Hagel says, noting that he asked the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, R. Nicholas Burns, "specifically, 'What is the position of this government on the United States on putting forces into an ISAF force if NATO takes a role?' And Ambassador Burns didn't answer directly. He was careful not to commit to anything that he couldn't fulfill."

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