There are some 54,000 international troops in Afghanistan: 26,000 from the United States and the rest mostly from NATO countries plus Australia. They are facing an increase in violence, up 27 percent over last year according to military sources, with a 60 percent spike in the southwestern province of Helmand which borders Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, and where the Taliban is resurgent.

It is no coincidence that Helmand is also one of the three provinces where soaring opium poppy growth has pushed overall production to pre-Taliban levels. The opium trade corrupts police and officials in those provinces and finances the Taliban who take their cut of revenues.

This is not the challenge that most NATO countries signed up for. They saw themselves contributing to Afghanistan's reconstruction not combating what U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates now calls "a classic counterinsurgency." Thirty-eight countries have supplied troops to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force but most of them, including those from Germany and France, are precluded by their governments from combat operations. Different national contingents have different rules of engagement.

Troops from the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia have been engaged with the Taliban in the southern provinces. However, public support for the troop presence is not strong in those countries apart from the United States. The Netherlands just committed to keep its troops in Afghanistan till 2010 only after a contentious public and parliamentary debate that threatened to break up the governing coalition. Dutch troops will definitely pull out in 2010, and the Canadians and Australians may well follow suit.

NATO strategy is failing. NATO troops defeat the Taliban in the tactical fights but there are not enough of them to secure the southern regions. As a result, the local population does not trust the government or the ISAF to protect them and the Taliban controls them through fear. Lacking boots on the ground, the ISAF relies on air-strikes against suspected Taliban sites, classic U.S. tactics. But the inevitable "collateral damage" errors leading to civilian casualties are hugely counterproductive, alienating the populace and drawing criticism from Afghan President Hamid Karzai on down.

Many Afghans criticize NATO's focus on the three provinces where the Taliban are active to the neglect of the rest of the country. The governor of Balkh province in the north, Atta Muhammad Noor, told the Middle East Times during a recent visit to Washington, that his province was suffering from the international community's failure to deliver on promised reconstruction assistance.

Noor wants the international community to reinforce success. His government successfully eradicated poppy production in the province. However, funds to promote replacement crops were not available and the poppy farmers shifted to cannabis production.

Noor, who was a sub-commander in the Northern Alliance that fought against Taliban rule, also has a proposal for solving NATO's shortage of boots on the ground. He would revive the combination of Northern Alliance foot soldiers and U.S. Special Forces, artillery, and air power to defeat the Taliban one more time. It's a politically volatile idea, but given NATO's present impasse, one worth looking at.