CDDRL Visiting Fellow J. Alexander Thier questions President Bush's assertion that Afghanistan is on a path to democracy. In three years, he notes, the United States has failed to create a secure, stable or prosperous Afghanistan.

President Bush describes Afghanistan, the first front on the war on terrorism, as a success. In comparison to Iraq, perhaps it is. But if you look at Afghanistan on its own merits, the lack of progress is disheartening. In 2002, President Bush promised a "Marshall Plan" for the country, with the goal of turning Afghanistan into a stable, democratic state. On Tuesday, before the United Nations General Assembly, the president said that "the Afghan people are on the path to democracy and freedom." Yet in nearly three years we have failed to create security, stability, prosperity or the rule of law in Afghanistan.

These failings are not just a reflection of the great difficulties of nation-building in places like Afghanistan, they are also the direct result of the Bush administration's policy decisions. Our efforts in Afghanistan are underfinanced and undermanned, and our attention is waning.

The root of the problem is that we invaded Afghanistan to destroy something - the Taliban and Al Qaeda - but we didn't think much about what would grow in its place. While we focused on fighting the terrorists (and even there our effectiveness has been questionable), Afghanistan has become a collection of warlord-run fiefs fueled by a multibillion-dollar opium economy. We armed and financed warlord armies with records of drug-running and human rights abuses stretching back two decades. Then we blocked the expansion of an international security force meant to rein in the militias. These decisions were made for short-term battlefield gain - with disregard for the long-term implications for the mission there.

Our Army continues to hunt insurgents in the mountains, but we have refused to take the steps necessary to secure the rest of the country, and it shows. More coalition and Afghan government soldiers and aid workers have died this year than in each of the previous two. This summer, Doctors Without Borders, which has worked in the most desperate and dangerous conditions around the world, pulled out of Afghanistan after 24 years. In other words, the group felt safer in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and the civil war that followed than it did three years after the United States-led coalition toppled the Taliban.

Last month, after a United Nations-backed voter registration office was bombed, the vice president of the United Nations Staff Union urged Secretary General Kofi Annan to pull employees out of Afghanistan. The opium trade is also out of control, fueling lawlessness and financing terrorists. Last year, the trade brought in $2.3 billion; this year, opium production is expected to increase 50 to 100 percent.

Amid terrorist attacks and fighting among regional warlords, the country is preparing for presidential elections on Oct. 9. A recent United Nations report warned that warlords were intimidating voters and candidates. This month, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has monitored post-conflict elections in trouble spots like Bosnia and Kosovo, declared that Afghanistan was too dangerous for its election monitors (it is sending a small "election support team'' instead). President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped assassination last week on his first campaign trip outside Kabul, and eight other presidential candidates have called for elections to be delayed, saying it's been too dangerous for them to campaign.

Many of these problems flow from early mistakes. Rather than moving quickly to establish security and then gradually turning over control to a legitimate domestic authority, we have done the opposite. As fighting among warlord militias in the countryside intensifies, we are slowly expanding our presence and being dragged into conflicts. The American "advisers" in Afghan Army units, the ubiquitous heavily armed "private" security forces and the fortress-like American Embassy are garnering comparisons to the day of the Soviets.

In Kabul, the effort to build a stable, capable government has also lagged dangerously. President Karzai has begun to show great fortitude in challenging warlords. But his factious cabinet, born of political compromise, has collapsed under the pressure of the country's hurried presidential elections. Outside Kabul, his control remains tenuous in some places, nonexistent in others. Kabul's Supreme Court, the only other branch of government, is controlled by Islamic fundamentalists unconcerned with the dictates of Afghanistan's new Constitution. On Sept. 1, without any case before the court, the chief justice ordered that Latif Pedram, a presidential candidate, be barred from the elections and investigated for blasphemy. His crime? Mr. Pedram had suggested that polygamy was unfair to women. These clerics are trying to establish a system like that in Iran, using Islam as a bludgeon against democracy.

It's true that there have been several important accomplishments in these three years: the Taliban and Al Qaeda no longer sit in Kabul's Presidential Palace; girls are back in school in many parts of the country; some roads and buildings have been rebuilt; and more than 10 million Afghans have registered to vote for the presidential elections. Thousands of international aid workers have been working with the Afghans, often at great risk, to make things better. Despite the slow progress, most Afghans are more hopeful about their future than they have been in years.

But many people working there are left with the nagging feeling that much more could have been done both to help Afghanistan and fight terrorism over the last three years. Our experience demonstrates that you can't fight wars, or do nation-building, on the cheap. Afghanistan should be a critical election issue this year, but Iraq looms much larger in the public mind. Unless the next administration steps up to the plate, it may well be an issue in four years, when we start asking, "Who lost Afghanistan?"

J Alexander Thier, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, was a legal adviser to Afghanistan's constitutional and judicial reform commissions.

In a San Jose Mercury News op-ed, APARC fellow Robert Madsen writes that internal conflict have paralyzed the Bush administration policy, leaving N. Korea unchecked in its pursuit of a nuclear arms program.

Neither the Bush nor the Kerry campaign has chosen to make U.S. policy toward North Korea a central part of its election platform -- and for good reason. Both sides recognize that it may no longer be possible to peacefully resolve the dispute over that country's nuclear-weapons development, and a debate over whether to wage another controversial war would hardly appeal to the electorate.

The fundamental problem is that North Korea believes it needs a sizable nuclear arsenal. Politically, such an asset would transform the country into a regional power whose views on international issues must always be taken seriously. Militarily, the possession of a large number of atomic weapons would bolster North Korea's security by discouraging intimidation of the sort Washington employed in 1994, when it forced President Kim Jong Il to shut down his plutonium-based arms program.

Most compelling, however, is Pyongyang's financial situation. The North Korean economy is so dysfunctional that it cannot reliably generate enough wealth to sustain the state. Kim and his colleagues have dabbled in reform, but they apparently realize that the degree of liberalization necessary to produce strong GDP growth would coincidentally release a wave of popular animosity sufficient to wash the government away. Thus, the safest course of action is to leave the economy unreconstructed while securing a constant stream of foreign aid.

Since Pyongyang needs leverage to obtain this support, it is determined to amass a big nuclear force. The international community would then have no means of persuading North Korea to abandon its weaponry short of risking catastrophic war and would consequently be reduced to bribing the Kim government not to use its new capabilities.

Moreover, if the flow of aid were interrupted, Pyongyang could garner the foreign exchange it requires by selling its new technology, fissile materials or even a few of its bombs.

What this implies is that despite its rhetoric to the contrary, North Korea does not really want to trade its nuclear program for economic assistance and a security guarantee. Pyongyang would plainly prefer to embark on diplomatic talks with nuclear weapons in hand. This is why it cheated on the 1994 agreement by enriching uranium and why it resumed reprocessing plutonium in early 2003. But to realize his strategic aspirations, Kim must still prevent the United States, China, Japan and South Korea from forming a coalition that imposes crippling sanctions before his armament effort has reached fruition.

Driving wedges between the other regional powers is not as difficult as it might seem. Paradoxically, perhaps, the United States is the only relevant country that views the achievement by North Korea of significant nuclear status as absolutely unacceptable.

Tokyo and Seoul are worried about that eventuality but conversely fear the geopolitical instability and refugee crisis that would ensue if economic or military pressure caused the Kim regime to collapse. Beijing shares these immediate concerns and additionally worries about the longer-term possibility that a united Korean Peninsula might incline toward the United States.

Only by alleviating these anxieties can the U.S. government unite East Asia against North Korea.

Washington, however, is constrained by its own internal rift. On the one hand are those doves who want to exchange aid and a security arrangement for the termination of North Korea's nuclear projects, on the other are the hawks who oppose all diplomatic contact with the Kim government. The conflict between these two camps has paralyzed Bush administration policy, leaving Pyongyang more or less free to proceed with its nuclear gambit.

If the doves err in overestimating Pyongyang's flexibility, the hawks are guilty of the more serious mistake of thinking that a refusal to negotiate with mendacious states is an actual diplomatic strategy.

In fact, the talks advocated by the doves are an essential step toward the application of coercive force. It is only by offering reasonable deals, and having the Kim government reject them, that Washington can demonstrate to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul that Pyongyang cannot be bought off with money and a verbal guarantee of its security. This recognition, in turn, is critical both to building a coalition against North Korea and, alternatively, to reducing the political costs of unilateral U.S. military action.

The better course has therefore always been to negotiate earnestly with Pyongyang in the hope that it would accede to a peace agreement while knowing that its failure to do so would facilitate the adoption of more assertive measures, if necessary, at a later date.

Yet rather than taking every opportunity to interact with Kim's representatives, the Bush administration has limited its diplomacy to desultory exchanges at multilateral conferences and only put forward a detailed settlement proposal in June. Pyongyang has exploited the opening created by this stubbornness fairly effectively. It has capitalized on anti-American sentiment in South Korea by persuading Seoul to cooperate economically and militarily while also prevailing upon Tokyo to resume large-scale food aid and seek an early exchange of ambassadors.

In the occasional six-party talks with delegations from China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States, Pyongyang's objective has been to stall for time. Its diplomats have postponed specific meetings many times; then behaved so egregiously that the other participants were relieved when the North Koreans consented merely to engage in future negotiations. Those too, however, would soon be rescheduled.

Washington has inadvertently abetted these tactics through thoughtless insults -- canceling, for instance, informal exchanges between U.S. and North Korean officials at the last minute -- which Pyongyang could then cite as proof that the United States was not acting in good faith.

North Korea has also benefited from the awkward developments that inevitably arise when sensitive dialogues are delayed. Seoul's recent declaration that it had reprocessed a small volume of nuclear material is one such event; Pyongyang may use that admission to complicate the next round of six-party discussions. Thus the Kim government buys more time for its nuclear technicians to continue their work.

It is true that North Korea has committed some blunders over the past two years, but it has played its cards more adroitly than the United States. The members of a potential coalition are largely going their own way now, and the odds that those countries will unite behind any U.S. strategy, peaceful or otherwise, have diminished considerably.

So, unless the winner of the November election acts quickly and with better judgment than Washington has so far, the United States may soon be forced to choose between launching military strikes without foreign support and letting Kim attain the nuclear status he desires.

ROBERT MADSEN is a fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford Institute for International Studies. He wrote this article for Perspective.

CDDRL director Michael A. McFaul weighs in on the mass murderers who seized the school in Beslan, Russia, this month committed one of the most heinous acts of terrorism in world history. Other murderers have killed children, and other terrorists have slaughtered more people, but it is hard to imagine anyone purposely killing this many innocent children in one attack. Russian President Vladimir Putin is most certainly right when he declares that he will not give in to the demands of these killers. Citizens deserve protection, and their killers deserve unflinching justice.