The righteous one offers no resistance to those who murder him, we hear in the Letter of James this Sunday. The top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan warned that without more troops soon, the allies would not be able to offer sufficient resistance to the growing Taliban insurgency, and the eight-year mission "will likely result in failure."

General Stanley McChrystal's urgent assessment is one factor that has led the Obama administration to a wholesale reassessment of the Afghan war effort. Others include the deteriorating conditions on the ground, widespread Afghan government corruption, and the messy outcome of the recent Afghan elections with their widespread claims of fraud.

"A counterinsurgency strategy can only work if you have a credible and legitimate Afghan partner. That's in doubt now," said Bruce O. Riedel, who led the administration's strategy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year. "Part of the reason you are seeing hesitancy to jump deeper into the pool is that they are looking to see if they can make lemonade out of the lemons we got from the Afghan election."

Although the president has said that a stable Afghanistan is central to the security of the United States, advisers said he is also wary of becoming trapped in an overseas quagmire. Increasingly restless members of Congress, echoing their war-weary constituents, are calling for McChrystal to appear before Congress to discuss his assessment of the war. Thus far the Pentagon has rebuffed the requests, saying the general needs to focus on the war operation.

McChrystal's stark assessment was contained in a confidential report prepared in August that was leaked to Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist famed for his scoops going back to the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers.

Source: Articles by Bob Woodward and Howard Kurtz for the Washington Post, Peter Baker and Elisabeth Bumiller for the New York Times, and Yochi J. Dreazen, Neil King, Jr., and Peter Spiegel for the Wall Street Journal