It was not so long ago that the US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was threatening to bomb Pakistan "back into the Stone Age". Cynics might suggest that this showed at least some enlightenment on Armitage's part because, unlike some of his colleagues, he did appear to understand that Pakistan had moved out of the Stone Age.

Armitage made his ill-judged and crass threat because he was angered by the links between the Taliban and Pakistan. It is well-documented that the Taliban movement was, to a large extent, a Pakistani creation. Young Afghan refugees were trained in Pakistani schools and, when they took over Afghanistan in 1996, they did so with considerable support from elements in the Pakistani intelligence services. But the Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf, eventually ensured that the Taliban quit Pakistan.

They may have quit, but they they did not disappear. They regrouped, and now that they are back in big numbers, they are proving to be rather better at insurgency than they were at ruling the country in the late 1990s. They are probably also now better at winning hearts and minds across Afghanistan.

They are less repressive, less puritanical, more sophisticated and more ideologically fluid.

The arrival of President-elect Barack Obama on the world scene is, sadly, not necessarily good news in this context.

While he would never tolerate a senior member of his administration threatening to bomb Pakistan into the Stone Age, he is committed to stepping up the conventional war against the Taliban. He wants to escalate the US involvement, and he is also saying that other members of Nato, including Britain, must commit considerably more troops to the campaign.

Thus far, the British involvement has been marked by an unfortunate contrast between political ineptitude back home and military heroism on the front line. When John Reid was Defence Secretary he announced that the mission in Afghanistan was to reconstruct war-torn areas and to eradicate the poppy harvest. He actually indicated that British troops would not be involved in direct fighting with the Taliban.

Of course, this soon changed. And as our troops have become more heavily involved in the fighting, they have been consistently let down by our politicians.

Yesterday the front-page lead in this newspaper was about claims that our frontline troops in Afghanistan are exposed to unnecessary risks because of inadequate equipment and poor leadership from the Ministry of Defence.

This is bad enough; even more alarming is the lack of strategic clarity. What exactly is the aim of the mission in Afghanistan, not just today and tomorrow but next year? And how will our government respond to American demands for significantly more British troops to be deployed there? The financial cost of the mission is already huge, and it is doubling on a yearly basis. At present rates, it will be £5bn by 2010.

If Obama has his way, it will be much more than that. How does this fit in with Chancellor Alistair Darling's already somewhat confused budget strategy? Is the commitment to fighting the Taliban open-ended? If it is, the costs will be horrendous, both financially and, much worse, in terms of human life.

This is a war that is perhaps not yet being lost, but is certainly not being won. The Taliban can be defeated in small-scale engagements and even battles, but then they vanish, only to reappear somewhere else. This is classic insurgency. It is pretty clear that there is growing support for them in Pakistan, which is the key to any political solution.

How Obama deals with Pakistan and Afghanistan will be the first major test of his surefootedness in international affairs.

There is talk that he wants to ratchet up the military effort while involving Saudi Arabia in a political initiative. There is also speculation that he will try to build an unlikely and loose alliance with Iran, which has a long border along the western side of Afghanistan.

If Obama could achieve specific Iranian support for his anti-Taliban policy in Afghanistan, that would be a coup, but how would it play in Pakistan? On the other hand, Iran would be very suspicious of US-led efforts to broker a deal in Afghanistan with the help of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Pakistan is one of the countries worst hit by the current global financial and economic crisis.

Some pessimists fear it is about to implode. If that happens, all hope of stability and security in the entire region will disappear for at least a generation.

Meanwhile, it will be a tragedy if the protracted misadventure in Iraq is to be succeeded by a longer and larger misadventure in Afghanistan. But that is exactly what looks like happening.

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