LONDON — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice huddled with British officials Wednesday to sketch out new goals for the troubled allied effort in Afghanistan at a time of deepening concern over the direction of the 6-year-old conflict.
She met with Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband ahead of a series of top-level meetings of Western allies in the months ahead to settle on a long-term course for the mission.
Rice said the Western allies needed to strengthen their leadership, add combat troops, crack down on the opium trade and extend the authority of Afghanistan's weak central government farther into the heartland.
"It's bumpy and there's a lot of maturing that the alliance is having to do to do this," she told reporters on her plane en route to London. Afghanistan "is a very difficult place to work."
Rice maintained that the trend in the country was toward improvement, but acknowledged serious problems, including the Taliban's ability "to wreak havoc on the Afghan people."
In this, her assessment was more sober than that of President Bush, who in his State of the Union address last week described a country with a surging economy, advancing education system and improving security. Bush did not mention in his address any of the problems confronting U.S. officials and their allies.
But over the last week, a series of reports by respected private groups -- including one co-chaired by retired U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James L. Jones, who also serves as a Bush administration special envoy -- have concluded that the mission faces grave dangers because of the weakness of the Afghan government and the uneven commitment of NATO nations.
Majorities in all the contributing countries, except for the United States and Britain, want their troops to pull out of Afghanistan.
Last month, a plan to install veteran British politician Paddy Ashdown as a "super envoy" to coordinate the mission was vetoed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a threat to his nation's sovereignty. Rice said she was confident the alliance would soon find another suitable candidate, most likely a European.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, though determined not to relive the frictions experienced in 2003 during the run-up to the Iraq war, continue to struggle against pressure from U.S. officials and others for troop increases.
