Those uncooperative al-Qaeda fighters -- they just won't cooperate with Bush and Rove's election-year timetable:

The top American commander in Iraq has decided to move reserve troops now deployed in Kuwait into the volatile Anbar Province in western Iraq to help quell a rise in insurgent attacks there, two American officials said Monday....

The movement of the brigade comes as several senior American officials in Iraq have begun to raise doubts about whether security conditions there will permit significant troop reductions in coming months....

More from The Washington Post:

Last week, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad conceded ... that parts of Anbar were under insurgent control. Ramadi is the capital of the overwhelmingly Sunni province....

"We hope to get rid of al-Qaeda, which is a huge burden on the city. Unfortunately, Zarqawi's fist is stronger than the Americans'," said one Sunni sheik, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of insurgent retaliation....

In Ramadi, people describe themselves as under siege. The fighters are moving to enforce the strictest form of Islam on the city, requiring head scarves for women and banning shorts and jeans for men, residents said....

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And meanwhile in Afghanistan, the U.S. is planning an even more significant election-year withdrawal. The troops are to be replaced by NATO forces, as Ahmed Rashid notes in The Telegraph:

Nato's deployment is part of Washington's agenda to reduce its forces in Afghanistan. It is pulling 3,000 troops out this summer and possibly more later.

The Karzai government is angry with Washington, because many Afghans see this as the start of a full American withdrawal.

Problem is, the Taliban are gaining strength, and the NATO forces aren't supposed to, y'know, fight:

Fighting a full-scale guerrilla war is not what countries such as Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany and others enlisted for. The mandate from their governments is reconstruction, not combat.....

General James Jones, the head of US and Nato forces in Europe, ... is now desperately trying to persuade contributing countries to end the restrictions they impose on their troops, making it impossible for some of them to fight or commanders to run a proper military campaign.

"What is the point of deploying troops who don't fight," ask many Afghans. That is why Gen Jones calls these caveats -- they now number a staggering 71 -- "Nato's operational cancer".

You may have a vague sense (especially after yesterday's riot) that things aren't going well in Afghanistan, and that's it's more of a trouble spot than you're generally being told. According to Rashid, it's a lot worse than that:

...Afghanistan has become the new battleground for the 59-year proxy war between India and Pakistan; Afghan anger at the Pakistanis is returned in kind, as Islamabad accuses Kabul of allowing Indian spies access to Pakistan's western border, while Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad are accused of funding an insurgency in Baluchistan province....

Al-Qa'eda ... has helped reorganise the Taliban, create unlimited sources of funding from the sale of Afghan-grown opium and forged a new alliance linking the Taliban with extremist groups in Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Iraq. Al-Qa'eda has facilitated a major exchange of fighters and training between the Taliban and the extremist groups in Iraq.

Iran is spending large sums out of its windfall oil income in buying support among disaffected and disillusioned Afghan warlords. The day America or Israel attacks Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, these Afghans will be unleashed on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan, opening a new front quite separate from the Taliban insurgency....

Yet in the past five years there has been no Western military presence in three of the four provinces in southern Afghanistan that constituted the Taliban heartland and today are the battleground for its revival....

Not enough troops in key parts of Afghanistan.

Which we ignored while we shifted our focus to Iraq.

Where we've never had enough troops.

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UPDATE: A dim bulb from the righty blogosphere quotes the opening of this post under the heading "Leftie Blogger claims al-Qaeda and Dems share common goal." Oh, yeah, I get it: Al-Qaeda in Iraq is wreaking havoc at an inconvenient time for Bush and Rove's electoral timetable, therefore Al-Qaeda in Iraq is pro-Democrat. Wow, that's just brilliant. By that logic, I guess Hitler was a Republican, and I guess the Al-Qaeda millennium plot was an attempt to get George W. Bush elected rather than Al Gore.