Oct. 10--Here's one presidential campaign promise you can believe. Come early next year, there will be more American troops in Afghanistan, fighting an ever more critical and difficult war.

Sen. Barack Obama has vowed as much, and so has Sen. John McCain. Both candidates, in fact, want troop increases in Afghanistan that are even larger than what the Bush administration is belatedly proposing.

President Bush's successor will have been elected, in fact, by the time the major U.S. intelligence agencies come out next month with what's expected to be their most extensive report in years on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The New York Times has seen a draft of the report, though, and its conclusions are awfully grim. Not very surprising, but grim all the while.

Here was a war, an entirely sensible war, launched under the most justifiable of circumstances after the Sept. 11 attacks carried out by the terrorist group al-Qaida.

And then?

The Bush administration went off to war yet again, in Iraq, either ignoring or not even noticing corruption within the government of Afghan president Hahmid Karzi, the resurrection of a booming heroin trade in Afghanistan and its government's inability to stop increasingly lethal attacks by Taliban and al-Qaida militants.

So goes a big part of President Bush's legacy and an even bigger part of the already complex foreign policy challenges awaiting the next president. Warnings from the CIA that the White House was much too slow in confronting a war that it was losing went unheeded. The United States got little in return for nearly $6 billion a year in aid to Afghanistan.

"It's taken them a long time to realize it, but now they know it's pretty grim," Henry Crumpton, a career CIA officer who retired last year as the State Department's top counterterrorism official, says about his colleagues in the Bush administration.

Voters can count on this, too, then. Neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. McCain will have the luxury of slow contemplation. What the intelligence agencies call a "downward spiral" will have to be reversed as quickly as possible, even as the next president navigates the potentially daunting course of finally ending the Iraq war and withdrawing the very troops required for a more difficult and crucial mission.

Don't wonder for an instant if either candidate is overstating what awaits us all in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, as well. This threat, unlike the weapons in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, is for real.

"We're into a very tough counterinsurgency fight and will be for some time," says Gen. David McKiernan, the top American officer in Afghanistan.

So goes about as apolitical a warning as we can imagine in this very political year.

The Issue: The Afghan crisis keeps getting worse.

The Stakes: It's telling that both candidates are more concerned than the President himself.

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