Not long ago, President Obama called our involvement in Afghanistan "a war of necessity." Now he has stepped back from that precipice and is reconsidering, in part because of Afghanistan's election fraud.

But trust in the Karzai administration should be only one part of that consideration. There are way too many unanswered questions about our involvement in Afghanistan. What's our goal? How do we define "success"? Will we fight until we "disrupt and dismember" Al Qaeda? Until we bury the Taliban for good? How long are we willing to stay? At what human cost?

We can't ignore the threat of terrorism, but what's the best way to combat it?

Proponents of an all-out military push note that Al Qaeda finds safe haven in Afghanistan. They remind us of the horrors of Taliban rule. They warn that the collapse of Afghanistan would destabilize the region - most quickly, Pakistan.

All of that is true. And yet: I don't see how we win whatever battle it is we're fighting in Afghanistan. I don't think we can defeat the Taliban militarily. And the multiple Al Qaedas and similar terrorist groups are technologically savvy, and they are mobile. If Al Qaeda leaders don't feel safe in Afghanistan, they'll go somewhere else. (Many of them, of course, are somewhere else.)

And the more I read, the more I'm convinced that our involvement in Afghanistan is making things worse.

Our air attacks are an example. There's this from a May 17 New York Times piece by David Kilcullen (formerly a counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus) and Andrew McDonald Exum (who has served in Afghanistan and Iraq): "While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants."

In an April article in The Nation, Katrina Vanden Heuvel quoted Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired colonel and Vietnam veteran - and, during the Bush administration, chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell: Our air attacks, he said, are simply boosting the Taliban's and Al Qaeda's recruiting efforts. "Research is now showing that the leaders that they replace them with are more radical than the leaders we hit," said Wilkerson.

An August commentary on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website, by Gilles Dorronsoro, gives a grim assessment of the situation in Afghanistan. The Karzai government and army are weak, he writes, "the justice and police programs have been a total failure," and local leaders, who have lost faith in the Karzai government, are arming themselves.

"In this void," says Dorronsoro, "the Taliban are discrediting the Afghan central government and destroying its presence, isolating the International Coalition, building an alternative administration, and extending their influence into areas where they initially had no support."

And, says Dorronsoro: "This situation forces the United States to take charge of local security and governance, which in turn enables the Taliban to call attention to the foreign occupation and recruit resistance to it."

Senator Russ Feingold has warned that troop buildup may make matters worse, pushing more Taliban and Al Qaeda into Pakistan and destabilizing that very shaky country.

The president knows all of this. As he reconsiders our mission, will he have the courage to say that we're fighting the wrong war? That we must back off and deal with terrorism in a more effective, less militarized way?

And will Republicans join him in reassessing? Or will they do what they are doing with health care?

Some experts predict it will take at least three years to "win" in Afghanistan. Some predict a decade. History suggests that we won't win at all.

We are on a tightrope now. This president did not get us into this, but it is now his war, and he must decide what to do. I'm very afraid that politics will drive both the discussion and the decision.