Nearly two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the US-led war on terrorism seems to be losing ground as a deadly strike on UN headquarters in Iraq and mounting violence in Afghanistan undermine stability in both countries.

Tuesday's truck bombing of the UN headquarters, which killed the UN special representative and at least 14 others, reflected a devastating new level of assaults against non-military targets in Iraq and US officials said the involvement of al-Qaeda -- the radical Muslim group blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks -- could not be discounted.

President George W. Bush vowed not to be intimidated by "terrorists" and those supporting ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But calls mounted for Washington to make changes, such as increasing its own troop presence in Iraq and bringing the international community more fully into the security and rebuilding effort.

"There's a clear escalation in the amount of resistance, the dimension of the resistance and the texture of the resistance" in Iraq, said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East expert with the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service.

Soon after Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, Sunni Muslims who were members of Saddam's Baath Party began an almost daily assault on US soldiers.

But in the last six weeks, a widening array of insurgents, including Iraqi Shias and foreign militants, are believed to have become active and the target list has broadened to include oil pipelines, utilities, the Jordanian Embassy and now, UN headquarters.

The attacks are "clearly giving the impression to the Iraqi people that the US with all its might is unable to preserve security, keep the electricity on and the water running," Katzman said. Some 140,000 US troops are in Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the last seven days, at least 90 people have been killed in Afghanistan in a series of ambushes, attacks and factional clashes, many involving Taliban fighters, whose leaders were overthrown by US troops in 2001 for harboring al-Qaeda members.

A 12,500-strong US-led military coalition remains in Afghanistan pursuing remnants of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda network more than 22 months after the US attacked the country.

Ellen Laipson, former vice president of the US National Intelligence Council, said, "I don't think the level of violence in either place suggests we've got a full outbreak of civil war or chaos in which international forces cannot operate."

But the risk to US and international forces "remains high and raises serious questions" about whether more troops are needed to improve security or whether they would just become additional targets of attack, she said.

David Mack, a former US diplomat now with the Middle East Institute, believes a key problem is that Americans "have been kidding ourselves about the nature of what we face in Iraq."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was right to oppose deployment of 300,000 troops in the war against Saddam but erred in not heeding top US army chiefs who argued such a large force was needed to stabilize the country once the fighting ended, Mack said.

Mack faulted the administration for underestimating the post-war challenges and for inadequate planning, despite repeated advance warnings from experts that winning the peace in Iraq could be even more important than winning the war.

If the US had a better plan for securing Iraq, it could have better protected infrastructure from sabotage and provided Iraqis more quickly with basic services that are still lacking, thus gaining more support from the civilian population and perhaps undermining insurgents, he said.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a Democratic contender for president, demanded that Bush reassess the situation.

"We must immediately and thoroughly review the security situation in Iraq, accelerate the training programs for indigenous Iraqi military and police security forces to protect those already working in Iraq and we must move quickly to add more international troops in Iraq through an expanded UN Security Council mandate," he said in a statement.

Judith Yaphe of the National Defense University predicted Tuesday's bombing would encourage more attacks.

But "it doesn't say we've done anything wrong. It's saying that we're unable to totally control and orchestrate the peaceful transition of Iraq," she said.

US experts and officials say only a minority of Iraqis are hostile to what the US is trying to do in Iraq, and Washington must do a better job of promoting awareness of progress that has been made and engaging Iraqis in the process.

(China Daily August 25, 2003)