The most ambitious of the assessments, run by the White House, begins in earnest this week with a series of high-level meetings, administration officials said. Officials have been directed to produce detailed recommendations within about two weeks for President Bush’s most senior advisers on a broad range of security, counterterrorism, political and development issues.

In the wake of a warning from NATO’s new top commander in Afghanistan that the international coalition is “struggling to win” and about 15,000 more troops are needed, Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said he would not be increasing troop numbers in the region. However, he would not rule out using infantry in combat roles.

Labor’s policy on Afghanistan has consistently been that Australia’s presence there, rather than Iraq, represents our commitment to fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban at “the coalface”. But the promises Labor made while in Opposition are forcing our troops into a long fight that will test even the might of the United States.

The aid — along with Vice President Dick Cheney’s high-profile visit to a region the Russians call “the near abroad” — is sure to inflame tensions further. Russia’s leaders have openly accused the United States of having provoked the conflict by arming the Georgia military while encouraging its aspirations to join the NATO alliance.

Dmitri A. Medvedev speculated that the war in Georgia was intended to benefit one of the candidates in the American presidential election, almost certainly a reference to Senator John McCain. He said the United States armed Georgia and then “gave Mr. Saakashvili carte blanche for any actions, including military ones.”

The military freeze between Russia and the alliance became official today. Under the security partnership with NATO, Russia has been co-operating on counter-terrorism and consulting on regional issues where Moscow and the West have mutual interests. The freeze has already led to the cancellation of Russian naval participation in an alliance exercise in the Baltic Sea and the planned visit to Russia of a US frigate has been scrapped.

The number of United States and NATO casualties is mounting so quickly, that unless something happens soon this could be the deadliest year of the Afghan war. Kabul, the seat of Afghanistan’s pro-Western government, is increasingly besieged. And Taliban and foreign Qaeda fighters are consolidating control over an expanding swath of territory sprawling across both sides of the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer accused Russia of failing to respect a French-brokered peace plan requiring both sides to move troops back to their positions before Georgia launched an offensive on the separatist region of South Ossetia. This “is not happening at the moment,” the NATO chief said at an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels today.

There is a split between “old and new Europe” — roughly Western and Eastern Europe, said Clifford Kupchan, a director of the Eurasia Group. New Europe, backed by Britain and Scandinavia, is taking a harder line toward Russia, while old Europe “will only be reinforced in its view that Georgia and Ukraine are not ready for NATO.”

A ceasefire continued to hold and President Dmitry Medvedev assured his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy that Russian regular forces “from tomorrow … will begin withdrawing,” the Kremlin said. However, new tensions gathered over Russia’s longer term military plans in the fervently pro-Western ex-Soviet republic.