By ELISABETH BUMILLER and MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON - Even as President Obama leads an intense debate over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, administration officials say the United States is falling far short of his goals to fight the country’s endemic corruption, create a functioning government and legal system and train a police force currently riddled with incompetence.

Interviews with senior administration and military officials and recent reports assessing Afghanistan’s progress show that nearly seven months after Mr. Obama announced a stepped-up civilian effort to bolster his deployment of 17,000 additional American troops there, many civil institutions are deteriorating as much as the country’s security.

Afghanistan is now so dangerous, administration officials said, that many aid workers cannot travel outside the capital, Kabul, to advise farmers on crops, a key part of Mr. Obama’s announcement in March that he was deploying hundreds of additional civilians to work in the country.

The judiciary is so weak that Afghans increasingly turn to a shadow Taliban court system because, a senior military official said, “a lot of the rural people see the Taliban justice as at least something.”

Administration officials describe Mr. Obama as impatient with the civilian progress so far. “The president is not satisfied on any of this,” said a senior administration official, who asked for anonymity so that he could more freely discuss internal deliberations at the White House.

The disputed August 20 Afghan election has laid bare the ineffectiveness of the government of President Hamid Karzai, administration officials said, and frustrated steps toward reform.

The vote was so tainted by evidence of fraud and irregularities that no clear winner emerged. The top United Nations official in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, affirmed on October 12 that the election was tainted.

Even before the election, a January Defense Department report assessing progress in Afghanistan concluded that “building a fully competent and independent Afghan government will be a lengthy process that will last, at a minimum, decades.”

Administration officials blamed the election for many of the setbacks and said a resolution to the vote would put them in a better position to move forward on civilian reforms.

“It was always regarded as hard to do, and it was very much keyed to having a successful election,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy research organization based in Washington. Brookings coordinated the Obama administration’s initial review of Afghanistan policy in the spring. “Instead we had a fiasco.”

The questions within the White House over the Afghan government’s dysfunction have to some extent been obscured by the loud public debate in recent weeks about whether to increase troop levels and by how much.

Administration officials said there had been progress on Afghan education and access to health care.

State Department officials also said they were close to their target of having 974 aid workers in Afghanistan by year’s end as part of what they called Mr. Obama’s civilian “surge.”

“From the very start, there was an understanding that we need to move quickly,” Jacob J. Lew, the deputy secretary of state overseeing the civilian deployment, said in a telephone interview. “We feel very good about the people we’re sending out. They’re motivated, they’re prepared, they’re brave.”

But Henry Crumpton, a former top C.I.A. and State Department official who is an informal adviser to General McChrystal, called those stepped-up efforts inadequate.

“Right now, the overwhelming majority of civilians are in Kabul, and the overwhelming majority never leave their compounds,” said Mr. Crumpton, who recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan. “Our entire system of delivering aid is broken, and very little of the aid is getting to the Afghan people.”


PHOTOGRAPHS BY TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES / The Afghan police force is seen as feckless and corrupt. An officer searched a man during a patrol in Kandahar.


Mark Mazzetti, Thom Shanker and Peter Baker contributed reporting.