Afghanistan. Pakistan. Forgotten. -- By JOE BIDEN

THE next president will have to rally America and the world to “fight them over there unless we want to fight them over here.” The “over there” is not, as President Bush has claimed, Iraq, but rather the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Afghanistan is slipping toward failure. The Taliban is back, violence is up, drug production is booming and the Afghans are losing faith in their government. All the legs of our strategy — security, counternarcotics efforts, reconstruction and governance — have gone wobbly.

We also need to make good on President Bush’s pledge for a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan. In six years, we have spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction only what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq.
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