Five months ago, Vance Serchuk, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote the following in the pages of the Weekly Standard:

While American politicians spent the ast months of 2005 arguing over the U.S. military presence in Iraq, their counterparts in the Netherlands were debating the future of the Dutch contingent in Afghanistan. At issue is The Hague's pledge to deploy slightly over 1,000 Dutch troops to the restive Uruzgan province when NATO assumes responsibility for southern Afghanistan this summer. The Netherlands' skittishness makes for an important cautionary tale not only about the near-farcical indecision of a European ally in the war on terror, but more important, the risks inherent in outsourcing ever-greater responsibility for Afghanistan to NATO, as the Bush administration evidently hopes to do.... The debacle with the Dutch began this fall, when the country's military intelligence service produced a report describing the treacherous conditions in Uruzgan and predicting casualties if the Netherlands dispatched forces there. Opposition parliamentarians began to rail against the mission, buoyed by public opinion; one poll found a whopping 71 percent of Netherlanders opposed to it. In truth, NATO's expansion into southern Afghanistan isn't being driven by conditions on the ground or by what makes sense for winning the war there. Rather, it is a function of the Pentagon's misplaced desire to reduce its commitments in the Middle East and bludgeon some defense reform out of Brussels in the process. The Bush administration furiously denies that NATO expansion should be seen as an American exit strategy, but this denial would seem more credible if the Pentagon didn't then explicitly link its 2,500-man drawdown in Afghanistan to the alliance's growing presence there. The danger here goes well beyond the narrow question of manpower. To a much greater degree than the Bush administration seems to appreciate, success in Afghanistan depends on a good-as-gold, long-term security guarantee from the United States. The survival of the Taliban, in turn, is contingent on a belief that the insurgents will outlast the Americans; that, sooner or later, Washington will tire of a grinding guerrilla war and go home. The United States needs to leave no doubt that its military will continue fighting in Afghanistan as long as the democratically elected government in Kabul needs help. For the same reason, irrespective of whether a diminution in the number of American soldiers is operationally doable, the Pentagon would have been wise to skip the press release and implement its drawdown quietly. Simply put, there was no strategic advantage to be gained in announcing to the world that there will be fewer U.S. forces in Afghanistan this year. Afghanistan's leaders certainly understand this. Senior officials in Kabul, tribal elders in the south, and newly elected legislators have all expressed concern about the troop reductions. "I would not like them to leave," Mullah Naquibullah, a tribal leader in Kandahar, told the New York Times last month.

Since Serchuk's piece, there have been several reports -- including this one from today's New York Times -- of increased Taliban activity in southern Afghanistan and serious concerns about passing off operations to NATO. From the Times:

Each spring with the arrival of warmer weather, the fighting season here starts up, but the scale of the militants' presence and their sheer brazenness have alarmed Afghans and foreign officials far more than in previous years. "The Taliban and Al Qaeda are everywhere," a shopkeeper, Haji Saifullah, told the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, as the general strolled through the bazaar of this town to talk to people. "It is all right in the city, but if you go outside the city, they are everywhere, and the people have to support them. They have no choice." The fact that American troops are pulling out of southern Afghanistan in the coming months, and handing matters over to NATO peacekeepers, who have repeatedly stated that they are not going to fight terrorists, has given a lift to the insurgents, and increased the fears of Afghans.

Good thing the Warsaw Pact stayed put.