Burdened by an illegitimate August presidential election, the prospect of a similar result in the Nov. 7 run-off election, rampant corruption, a soaring heroin trade, and the bloodiest fighting in eight years of war, the outlook in Afghanistan is bleak.

Even before the end of the month, the war there had claimed more U.S. soldiers' lives in October -- 55 through Tuesday -- than in any other month in the prolonged war. The deaths of eight American soldiers in combat Tuesday were preceded by the deaths on Monday of 11 service members who were killed in two helicopter crashes, along with three civilian U.S. drug enforcement agents. The month's toll reflects a trend evident since August.

The August U.S. death count, 51 troops, was then the highest monthly toll. September and October were also the deadliest months overall so far for NATO troops. Most American and other NATO deaths in Afghanistan stem from roadside bombs, the same sort of improvised explosive devices, or IEDS, that typically, and often horrifically, wound more soldiers than they kill.

Beyond mounting casualties

The casualty tally frames the tableau against which two key events await. One is the Nov. 7 run-off election for the Afghan presidency, which President Hamid Karzai almost certainly will steal as boldly as he did the August ballot. The other is the pending decision by President Obama on Gen. Stanley McChrystal's recommendation to send up to 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to help mount a broader anti-insurgency operation.

That strategy is rightly controversial. The additional infusion of so many more U.S. troops would not be nearly enough -- independent of a better Afghan government -- to turn the tide against the resurgent Taliban.

American now has around 60,000 troops in Afghanistan. The addition of 40,000 more still wouldn't compare with the 165,000 that America had in Iraq at the peak of the 2007 surge. And even that number was inadequate to turn the tide in Iraq, a much smaller and far more navigable country than Afghanistan's far-flung and ruggedly mountainous terrain.

More troops not answer

Iraq's army and police corps, moreover, was more than twice as large as comparable Afghan forces, and at least twice as effective per member. Even so, the surge was not what turned Iraq around. Rather, it was Iraq's Sunni "Awakening" Councils that finally rejected al-Qaida's random bombings and hideously murderous coercion of Sunnis to fight the Shiite-dominated government. Ultimately, it was the willingness of Gen. David Petraeus to put the Awakening's 100,000-plus fighters on the U.S. payroll, at $300 a month stipend for each fighter, that tipped the scales against the Sunni insurgency.

Such an anti-Taliban movement is unlikely in Afghanistan. The Taliban's major strength, and major source of fighters, lies in the Pashtun tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Indeed, the Pashtun, Afghanistan's majority ethnic group, and Taliban have become largely indistinguishable.

The Taliban does kill and intimidate Pashtun who openly oppose its operations, but it also draws recruits from fellow Pashtuns who agree with its extremist religious views of Islam and Sharia law. Others are attracted by its hostile nativist view of American and NATO troops as foreign occupiers.

Given those factors, introduction of more U.S. or NATO troops is almost certain to further inflame the Taliban insurgency. What's more, other NATO nations are unlikely to add more troops to their roughly 35,000 joint contingent. The war is extremely unpopular in Germany, whose troops still avoid use of force. France says it won't add more troops. Great Britain has said it would support more troops from the United States, but would add just a token of 500 new troops of its own.

The core priority

President Obama's decision on increasing troop levels, to have a prayer of hope, would have to be augmented by a legitimate government, one that is capable and willing to stem corruption, improve schools, infrastructure and health care, and provide hope to Afghans who after eight years have given up hope for positive change from President Karzai and from the American forces that are still making war in their country.

President Karzai hardly seems the person for the challenge. His government has abjectly failed to govern well -- or, indeed, at all -- outside Kabul. It's widely and accurately seen as corrupt and ineffective. Even as the Taliban largely finances its war by protecting and taxing Afghans' production of 90 percent of the world's heroin, moreover, a picture of Mr. Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was plastered across the front page of The New York Times Wednesday atop a story that chronicled his role as a corrupt heroin trader and as a paid CIA agent for much of the past eight years who helped recruit a secret para-military force to do the CIA's bidding. The entanglement with the CIA is ominous.

President Karzai tainted

President Karzai himself is also under a deep cloud for using 1,500 ghost polling places to manufacture more than 1 million phony votes to tilt the August election his way, according to charges by Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador and a special representative of the United Nations to Afghanistan during the August election. His charges also appeared in an op-ed piece in The New York Times Wednesday.

Amid all these sources of controversy, angst, insurrection and violence, it is increasingly evident that there will be no expedient path either to extract American forces from Afghanistan, or to effectively guide their efforts in Afghanistan. If the Nov. 7 election does not produce a victory for Mr. Karzai's chief challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, and his proposed constitutional changes to improve governance, the outlook for Afghanistan will be even bleaker.