Barack Obama wants more troops in Afghanistan, American troops and, ever more insistently, European troops. But are more soldiers really the solution?

Things aren't going well in Afghanistan. The security situation has been steadily wor-sening. The number of bomb plots and suicide attacks is rising. The writ of the Karzai government does not run far beyond the city limits of Kabul. Regional warlords and drug barons rub shoulders in the cabinet with political figures trying to do an honest job. Corruption and nepotism are rife. Grave mismanagement and an appalling lack of accountability go hand in hand. The economy is a shambles, unemployment rampant, and poppy-growing is frequently the only source of income. Time-honored tribal structures foil the nation-building effort.

Would more soldiers really make a difference? I doubt it. There are 50,000 already there.  Two more American brigades, 1,000 more Bundeswehr troops, a couple of thousand soldiers from other nations will hardly turn things around. If we wanted to have the same density of soldiers per square kilometer as in Kosovo, we would have to deploy another 300,000 or 400,000 men. That's simply unthinkable, as we simply haven't got them. And in all likelihood, an increased foreign military presence would merely fuel the ongoing insurgency.

Nor is stepping up the civilian effort a panacea. It is true that the international community has perhaps not done enough: Aid to the tune of E9.5 billion since 2001 is not even half of what has been promised. It is also true that about one third of this sum has been spent on foreign advisers, foreign aid workers and foreign suppliers. And there is no denying the fact either that a sizeable portion of the money has lined the pockets of greedy Afghan officials and politicians. More aid has been promised but without far better coordination, its impact will again be limited.

A recent Rand Corporation study makes the point that the U.S. government ought to rethink its "war against terror" strategy. Military campaigns, the argument runs, have rarely been successful against insurgence; local police and intelligence forces held more promise; and one should never shun negotiations in order to arrive at a political solution.

This is sound reasoning. Let's admit that there is a yawning gap between required and available resources. And let's not delude ourselves that we could militarily succeed where Alexander the Great failed 2,300 years ago, where the British came to grief in the 19th century and the Soviets had to beat a retreat in the 20th century. Nor should we assume that we can refashion Afghan society after the Western model. Any such attempt runs counter to deeply engrained traditional and religious values and is bound to fail for that reason.

At the end of the day, a "Taliban-lite" regime may be the best we can achieve - pious but without al Qaeda connections, Islamic but not terrorist, not Western but neither  hostile to the West.