Less than three weeks after the onset of military operations, some experts on Afghanistan are starting to question the deepening US intervention in central Asia. Many are already calling for an end to or a sharp reduction in the military campaign.
The experts, including former senior US officials and ambassadors, are warning that the political and military elements of Operation Enduring Freedom are doomed to slip into a quagmire - or fail entirely - unless US policy is quickly amended, goals reduced and the air war soon curtailed.
"The military bombing in and around populated areas should stop now because it does more damage to the political goals than we achieve militarily by a bomb hitting a car with some Taliban in it," said Mr Peter Tomsen, the last senior US envoy to Afghanistan, serving from 1989-1992.
He also cautioned that bombing the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar plays into the hands of Osama bin Laden and his radical allies in the propaganda war by making it easier to portray the United States as attacking Afghanistan - not a clique of hardened terrorists and their state supporters.
"The only way to replace the Taliban is to support a political alternative to them," said Mr Barnett Rubin, director of studies at New York University's Centre on International Co-operation, "and the more these attacks continue, the more you'll find people siding with the Taliban."
They are also concerned about how the campaign is being viewed in the broader Islamic world, where the United States has an array of interests, including access to reasonably priced oil.
So far, the military efforts do not seem to have produced the anticipated results, Mr Henri Barkey, a former State Department official who is chairman of Lehigh University's International Relations Department, said. It was assumed that a massive air campaign would spark significant Taliban defections, which hadn't yet happened.
The growing chorus of concern mirrors the first cracks within the US political wall of support for the airstrikes. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Democrat Senator Joseph R. Biden, has warned that unless the air attacks end "sooner rather than later", the US risks appearing to be a "high-tech bully. Every moment it goes on, it makes the aftermath problems more severe," he said.
The efforts to remake Afghanistan politically faces daunting challenges, experts say. Attempts to cobble together a strong or united government that could rule if the Taliban regime falls may be over-ambitious, especially considering the nation's enduring tribal, ethnic and religious fragmentation.
"Our biggest vulnerability is that we are not in a position to deliver the end result we want: an Afghanistan with a minimally competent government able to pursue stability and internal reconstruction without excessive manipulation from outside powers," a former US ambassador, Ms Teresita Schaffer, said.
Meanwhile, the infection of a mail sorter in a State Department facility and findings of contamination in a CIA sorting office in Langley, Virginia, the Supreme Court's mail facility, and at a military post office at Silver Springs in Maryland, have led to fears that contaminated letters are still unaccounted for. There were also reports that a local employee at a foreign bank in the Pakistani city of Karachi had contracted anthrax. - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)
AFP adds: Initial tests on anthrax sent to Senate majority leader Mr Tom Daschle have found a chemical additive which keeps the spores airborne and is a trademark of Iraq's biological weapons program, ABC News reported last night.
World News Tonight reported that the chemical agent, bentonite, helped to keep the tiny anthrax particles in mid-air by preventing them from sticking together. Bentonite is a trademark of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program, the report said, although it could be used by other countries.