With the US economy in turmoil, the election campaign nearing the end, and the Iraq war relegated to the back pages, we ignore to our peril a potentially catastrophic US military policy now being implemented in Afghanistan.

The current consensus in higher political circles, including both major-party candidates for president, is that the war in Afghanistan must be escalated, with far more US troops and no negotiation with insurgents. Such unilateral military escalation appears all but inevitable, despite a series of devastating assessments emanating from key quarters.

A draft of the latest National Intelligence Estimate, issued by the entire American intelligence community, concludes that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral," with little chance to stem the rise of Taliban resurgence. A recent RAND study on Afghanistan found that military force is "too blunt, an instrument" to use in this war, with only a 7 percent chance of success.

Admiral Michael Mullen, chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in the past month, "absent a broader international and interagency approach to the problems there, it is my professional opinion that no amount of troops in no amount of time can ever achieve all the objectives we seek in Afghanistan."

"We all know that we cannot win it militarily," the United Nations' special envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, has said. "What we need most of all is a political surge." Britain's commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, has also said that a troop surge would only create more targets for the Taliban. He insists that the war can not be won and that only negotiation would offer "the sort of progress needed to end the insurgency."

The British ambassador to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, noting that "the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust," forecasts that the NATO-led mission will fail. The historical experience of other outside powers trying to control Afghanistan, most spectacularly the Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989, suggests that even a greatly escalated US-NATO war effort will only multiply the deaths and the suffering, and that continued US-NATO action in the country is a large part of the problem and cannot be the solution.

The US military has increasingly turned to bombing to deal with Afghan insurgents, dangerously spilling into nuclear-armed Pakistan as well. Since January2008, 2,500 people have been killed in Afghanistan, about half of them civilians, and a growing majority of Afghans now want US and NATO forces out.

Meanwhile, after six years of war, women's status has worsened, along with grinding poverty, little food, water and employment, and increasing oppression from the Karzai government's fundamentalist judiciary and resurgent Taliban presence. And the heroin trade, now funding the insurgency and the Taliban, has exploded since the occupation of Afghanistan, reversing the Taliban's prior ban on opium production.

The US war in Afghanistan was never the "good war" it was portrayed to be, but rather a long-planned war for regional control justified by the double pretense (neither accomplished) of ousting the Taliban and killing Bin Laden. But whatever its origins, the current US war and occupation in Afghanistan can lead only in one direction: to increasing devastation of that country and its people, and to yet another avoidable and costly catastrophe for the US.

DOUG NOBLE, ROCHESTER

(Noble is a member of Rochester Against War.)