Does the Bush administration need to do a reality check on the achievements of its Middle East policies? Outgoing US ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad who has just moved to the same job in Baghdad, told Afghans that their country was now four-tenths of the way along the route to peace and democracy. Yet since the spring, attacks by regrouped Taleban and Al-Qaeda forces have been increasing in frequency and ferocity.

The 12,000 US troops in the country backed up by the Afghan police and army seem ever harder-pressed by their attackers whose ambitions are clearly rising. An alleged plot by three Pakistanis to assassinate Ambassador Khalilzad, though discovered, suggests that the Afghan insurgents are still far from beaten.

It will be much harder for Khalilzad to maintain anytime soon that Iraq is forty percent of the way along the road to peace and democracy. Despite some 150,000 US troops and a constant series of anti-terrorist operations since Fallujah was overrun, the level of the Iraqi insurgency appears to be increasing rather than decreasing.

Washington’s strategy has always been that if they could support the Afghan and Iraqi governments in a resolute confrontation with the men of violence, while building up both democratic processes and the police and armies in each country, the backs of both insurgencies would be broken. This analysis may yet prove correct — but maybe George Bush should be thinking now about Al-Qaeda’s strategy. Thanks to the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the terrorists have been given opportunities to attack the Americans that they might never have dreamt of. Elements in the local communities who share the insurgents’ hatred of the Americans are ready to make common cause with them and are prepared to shelter them.

Iraq Baathists and their Al-Qaeda allies may be suffering setbacks as they are attacked but clearly, they are still able to push the level of violence to new heights. Maybe, like the North Vietnamese in 1968, they are throwing absolutely everything into a final Tet Offensive, a gamble that for the Vietnamese paid off.

They may sense that as in Vietnam, the US will to carry on fighting is on the verge of breaking. US casualties in Iraq have yet to reach the tens of thousands as in Vietnam but ordinary Americans are increasingly questioning not only what their military is doing in Iraq and how much it is costing, but the validity of the grounds on which the invasion was launched in the first place. Although the White House insists its forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are making progress, this message is becoming harder and harder to sell. Most Americans are beginning to count the cost.

But Bush knows that unless he can defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is staring at an even greater humiliation than the horror of 9/11.