Coalition forces in Afghanistan are fed up and in disarray, reports Chris Stephen, from Bagram
Remember the War Against Terrorism? The United States is certainly trying to. Because all those bold words issued last September about "focus" and "clarity" have melted into the dust of the Afghan plains.
Eight months on from the World Trade Centre attack, the resolve has drained away, to the extent that the coalition forces now assembled here at this giant ruined airbase at Bagram, north of Kabul, are nearly toothless. The political will to take on al-Qaeda, with all that that entails, has gone.
Notwithstanding the current fighting taking place in the southern mountains, the truth is that most of the al-Qaeda fighters have melted away, along with their boss, Osama bin Laden.
Some have gone to sympathisers among Afghans, of whom there are many. Others have simply skipped over the border into Pakistan, whose government, fearing a fundamentalist backlash, refuses to do anything about it.
This has left the assembled coalition forces in disarray. Special forces from half-a-dozen nations are stuck here, in this dusty airbase, uneasily aware of the fate of the Soviets who first built it to launch their own war against Afghan guerrillas.
Making matters worse, there are now splits in the coalition: the two main coalition partners, the US and Britain, are at each other's throats, after the Americans refused to provide paratroopers to seal a valley the British were moving through earlier this month in a set-piece mission, named Operation Snipe.
The result, to everyone's embarrassment, was that as the Brits moved into one end of the valley, al-Qaeda ran out of the other.
Nothing could better show up the distance between these supposed allies than the choice of name for the mission: Snipe was picked by the Brits. But to Americans, the expression Snipe Hunt means "to go on a fruitless search". And while other nations are queuing up to provide non-combat troops, transport planes and other help, nobody wants to send combat troops into action in the Afghan mountains.
Indeed, this whole mission, named Enduring Freedom, seems jinxed: in April the newly arrived Canadians sustained their first combat casualties since the Korean war, not from al-Qaeda but from American bombs dropped in error.
And the decision of the British to ignore the US practice of flying their food in, and buy from local markets, is thought to be the reason why 38 soldiers, most of them medical staff, have been felled, and 350 quarantined, by a mystery stomach bug.
So desperate are the Americans for news of bin Laden that Canadian forces were this month sent to scrape blood from the walls of the Tora Bora cave complex hoping it would match the DNA of his family members and prove that the great demon was killed by American bombs last December.
Instead, the Canadians came back with disturbing news: they found a "martyrs cemetery", containing the 23 bodies of an al- Qaeda rearguard who fought a sacrificial battle that allowed the bulk of bin Laden's force to escape into Pakistan.
This cemetery has become a place of pilgrimage, with some making the dangerous trek from across the Pakistan border to say prayers at the neatly tended graves. For the truth is, the Americans have stumbled into an Afghan civil war and may be backing the wrong side.
Their bombs allowed the Northern Alliance, led by Tajiks, to seize power in Kabul, at the expense of the more numerous Pashtuns, former backers of the Taliban. But the result has left the Pashtuns angry and bruised, and far from ready to throw in their lot with the hated Americans.
Al-Qaeda is not short of places to hide, as long as it stays inside the southern, Pashtun belt.
With morale strained, journalists staying at Bagram are carefully kept away from the ordinary troops.
But there is one outlet for soldierly discontent beyond the powers of even the toughest spin machine - the lines of plastic Portaloos dotted around the camp. The insides of these are now covered in soldier's graffitti.
These toilet walls are daubed with the angry scribbles blaming their commanders for inaction, blaming each other's units for failures, or simply wishing to go home.
One early message, congratulating the 100th American Mountain division, has now been angrily crossed out by another hand, demanding to know "What the hell they did that the rest of us are not doing?" And many Portaloos now sport cartoons, of increasing dexterity, showing coalition troops looking in vain for al-Qaeda in the mountains, while across the border, in their Pakistan sanctuaries, the terrorists sit laughing.
The loss of nerve comes from the very top: there is indecision in Washington about whether the American public is ready for the losses that a sustained fight against al-Qaeda may entail.
Unless America can dissuade Pakistan, nervous about its own fundamentalists, from opening its territory, the coalition forces are going to have to stay here for years, fending off attacks by al- Qaeda units who can decide the time and place for their cross-border raids.