Given current signs it seems to me that it is very likely that the U.S.-backed government of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai will fall and that the United States and NATO will be driven out of Afghanistan within a few months.

I don't think that will happen before the U.S. elections, now near at hand, but it is possible that the capital, Kabul, will fall within weeks.

It sometimes takes the British to tell Americans the hard truth. This time it is the senior British commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, based in key Helmand Province, who said over the weekend that he believed decisive victory over the Taliban was unlikely. He cited the increasing number of Taliban attacks on NATO and Afghan government forces and the widening scale and scope of the violence and of Taliban control in the country.

He went on to say that the only way he could see to bring the Taliban insurgency to an end was through talks -- heresy in current U.S. policy terms. He also urged a stronger role for Afghan government forces, as opposed to more NATO or U.S. participation in the escalating war.

There is no question but that the situation on the ground is deteriorating rapidly, for both foreign and government forces. The means that U.S. and other NATO forces are using to counter Taliban advancement -- the heavy use of bombing and strafing by aircraft and drones -- are severely alienating the Afghan civilian population against both foreign forces and the Karzai government, which Afghans see the foreign forces as propping up.

In other words, the United States currently is in the position of destroying Mr. Karzai and his government by defending them against their Taliban enemies. This is not where we should be.

The other potentially catastrophic element in the picture is that, in no small part because of the mess in Afghanistan, Pakistan now is also spinning out of control. Its government is fighting the Taliban, as well as other rebel elements, in its border region with Afghanistan, partly at U.S. behest, larded by $10 billion in largely military aid in recent years. Pakistan's new civilian government, headed by the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's cupiditous widower Ali Asif Zardari, is staggering in the face of the conflict. It would probably save itself by negotiating with the Taliban and other dissident elements if the United States were not insisting that it punch it out with them. Pakistan has a population of 165 million and nuclear weapons.

Over the past two decades in Afghanistan, the United States did two things right and two things wrong. We are now at the edge of playing the fifth match, to win or to lose, at least for the near future.

Let's leave out U.S. support of Afghan nationalist forces, the mujahedeen, which included the Taliban, against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan in the 1980s. That was an unqualified success in terms of kicking the last leg out from under the Soviet Union, leading to the end of the Cold War, for then anyway.

The first U.S. mistake came under the Clinton administration when, instead of building on our excellent relations with the mujahedeen freedom fighters as they set up a government to rebuild and develop post-Soviet Afghanistan, we walked away. Thus came the radical Taliban regime, al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden and, eventually, 9/11.

The first good move after 9/11 was to work closely with Taliban and al-Qaida enemies to send them packing, in flight, out of the country.

The second good move was our initial effort to work with the Afghans in setting up a functioning, quasi-democratic government in Afghanistan. This involved the loya jirga national congress, elections, the choice of the relatively credible Mr. Karzai as president, the launching of economic development efforts and other steps.

The second very bad U.S. move was the second U.S. walk-away from Afghanistan, demonstrating unreliability as well as arrogance and long-standing ignorance. This time it was the administration of President Bush, looking to go to war with Iraq as the new Karzai government was just staggering to its feet in Afghanistan. Worse, the Taliban, al-Qaida and bin Laden were on the run at first, but were then able to regroup in the Sherwood Forest of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the mountainous border area.

So what should we do now?

First of all, I don't think either U.S. presidential candidate gets it in Afghanistan. Sen. John McCain takes a predictable, all-war, all-the-time approach to the Afghan conflict. Sen. Barack Obama seems to favor a "surge" strategy. Both should be asked the question, "How many American troops do you think are needed to stabilize Afghanistan?" The realistic answer would be the one that sank U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki before the Iraq war -- "several hundred thousand" -- which everyone knows we don't have with 140,000 in Iraq.

So why not keep our current level of forces in Afghanistan and ask Pakistan, Mr. Karzai, NATO, Russia and China to organize with us an all-party Afghan conference, with international godfathers in attendance, to seek to wrap up the regional war in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Although the enterprise could not come to fruition until after the U.S. elections, it might forestall the Taliban taking of Kabul and, over the long haul, it would be much preferable to the increasingly dismal alternative scenarios now before us.