Despite the renewed attention Iraq has attracted after its landmark legislation set the stage for U.S. withdrawal, foreign policy experts are hoping another American battlefield, Afghanistan, will succeed in its democratic experiment ahead of that nation’s presidential elections next September.

Current Afghan President Hamid Karzai requested a timetable on war operations in Afghanistan Nov. 25 ahead of the elections, which the United States hopes will reduce the influence of religious extremists in the mountainous country.

A group of panelists with experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan discussed the proposal at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government Monday, saying the challenges facing both Afghanistan and its southern neighbor Pakistan will not be easy to solve.

‘The war is going on auto-pilot, and the U.S. and NATO have really lost sight of its original objectives,’ Rubin said. ‘All of the goals are increasingly slipping out of reach.’

Barnett Rubin, director of studies at New York University’s Center for International Conflict, said many areas of the country are still controlled by the Taliban, which the United States ousted from power in 2001, because of the government’s weakness in extending its authority to rebel territories.

Karzai has stated that Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the training ground for most Taliban extremists, but Rubin said he witnessed the opposite after visiting fearful Afghan citizens in remote regions run by the Taliban.

Former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Maleeha Lodhi said President-elect Barack Obama’s administration will need to stabilize both Afghanistan and Pakistan at the same time if it is to root out terrorists.

‘There is an urgent need for the U.S. to redefine goals and to do so with clarity,’ Lodhi, a fellow at the HKS Institute of Politics, said. ‘A strategy for the stabilization of Afghanistan cannot lead to the destabilization of Pakistan.’

Lodhi said President George W. Bush’s policies led to the destabilization of Pakistan. The United States has become a ‘fire brigade’ that rushes from situation to situation putting out fires rather than taking a proactive stance to prevent them, she said.

Steven Coll, president of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit public policy institute, said it will be difficult for the U.S. to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan at the same time because it lacks the capacity to fight two wars at once.

Human Rights Watch senior military analyst Mark Garlasco said that though the United States has been criticized abroad for its use of military force in the war on terror, the biggest cause of death in Afghan civilians comes from military action by the Taliban and other insurgents.

‘The U. S. is trying to avoid and minimize civilian casualties,’ he said.