Bombs drop, civilians die, frontlines stagnate and Osama bin Laden remains at large.
If this scenario drags on for weeks and months, the US and its allies risk seeing an erosion of public support for their military assault on Afghanistan's ruling Taliban.
Western analysts say the military drive is progressing much as anticipated: the error lies with anyone who expected conventional warfare to produce quick results against terrorism.
"The military campaign is important but it's a relatively small part of the overall campaign to reduce the risk of terrorism to citizens," Sir Timothy Garden, a military expert at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs, told Reuters.
US President George W. Bush has said he wants bin Laden "dead or alive." Ousting the Taliban became a goal after the Islamist hardliners refused to surrender the man accused of organizing the September 11 plane attacks on New York and Washington.
US and British leaders have stressed that the struggle against terrorism will be long, but the lack of swift and visible gains against bin Laden and his Taliban protectors may still disconcert hearts and minds at home and abroad.
"The Americans could lose the propaganda war," said William Hopkinson, a British writer on international security.
"The worst thing would be a dribble of civilian casualties and no progress through the winter, only a week or two away."
When the president of the globe's mightiest military power declares war on terrorism and vows to rid the world of evil, he raises expectations that at the very least the US and its allies will be able to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban.
The bombing began nearly three weeks ago. Early on, the Pentagon boasted it had achieved air superiority over low-tech Taliban forces, knocking out airfields and radar and destroying what was described as their "command and control system."
The tone has become less triumphal.
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested this week that bin Laden may never be caught and the US deputy director of operations, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeam, acknowledged that the Taliban were proving tougher than expected.
The air campaign, apparently more by design than accident, has failed to dislodge the Taliban from frontlines against their outnumbered and outgunned Northern Alliance foes.
Taliban estimates of 1,000 civilian deaths so far may be unverifiable, but the Pentagon has admitted some bombs have gone astray. Footage of wounded children, flattened houses and terrified refugees angers many in the Muslim world and beyond.
To cap a wobbly week for the allies, the Taliban said on Friday they had killed Abdul Haq, an exiled opposition military chief who had crossed back into Afghanistan to try to convince pro-Taliban Pashtun tribes to switch sides.
So have the Americans lost the plot? Only if you have a misplaced belief in what military power can do, analysts argue.
Garden said military action to destroy bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan seemed to be "proceeding on the rails," though the benefits in terms of disrupting the flow of recruits to his cause might be tangible only in the long term.
Eliminating al-Qaeda leaders required "police" action, intelligence and "feet on the ground" to search them out.
"We have just started in Afghanistan. This may take years and there's no guarantee of getting all of them," Garden said, recalling the incomplete search for Balkans war criminals.
The task of removing the Taliban, which the allies say is vital to stopping Afghanistan from being a haven for terrorists, is complicated by uncertainty over who might replace them.
"No one is very enthusiastic about the Northern Alliance rushing in, so there are political constraints," Garden said.
Hopkinson agreed that the prospect of possibly vengeful minority Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras sweeping into Kabul risked destabilizing Afghanistan's southern Pashtun heartland and possibly the Taliban's traditional ally, Pakistan.
"They may be our guys, but they are not good guys," he said of the Northern Alliance.
Some alliance leaders say they want to capture the northern town of Mazar-i-Sharif, but not Kabul, pending a broad-based Afghan government, which the United Nations hopes to broker.
Hopkinson questioned the wisdom of talking of a "war" on terrorism, except in a metaphorical sense. "The military is not the main instrument here. Waging war on terrorism means police, intelligence, judicial extraction," he said.
Adding small numbers of crack British commandos to the US-led coalition may have no great impact, he said, unless markedly improved intelligence could identify targets for them.
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