SEVEN WEEKS after being attacked, three weeks after beginning the bombing of Afghanistan and since the discovery of anthrax here at home, how goes the war?

According to plan, the administration says. Unfortunately, it's a flawed plan.

The administration's plan is shaped by three (self-imposed) constraints: No ground troops in Afghanistan; No confrontation with Iraq; No alarm at home. The result? No evident progress so far.

Isn't "so far" the key qualifier, though? After all, we're told, we have to be patient. And of course we should be--if patience is in the service of sound strategy. But patience can also be an excuse for not re-thinking a failing strategy, for not doing difficult things we should be doing. Patience can be a form of denial. And in war, denial is dangerous.

So let's stop denying some painful truths. We probably cannot win the war in Afghanistan without ground troops. Bombing--very heavy bombing--wasn't enough to defeat Saddam in 1991, and only the threat (finally) of ground troops brought Milosevic to yield in 1999. Hostile regimes tend not to succumb to air power alone--especially when the use of air power is itself constrained by diplomatic considerations, as it has been in Afghanistan. And the fall of the Taliban regime is the indispensable first step to routing bin Laden and his network.

The administration is right to say the overall war on terrorism will take time. But the campaign to remove the Taliban from power is a matter of urgency. Wishful thinking about air power has cost us seven weeks in which significant ground troops--not just special forces--could have been readied for action.

Now, we face the threat of the Taliban continuing in power through the winter. This would be something close to a disaster. It would convey an impression of American weakness. It would increase the prospects for instability in Pakistan and other nations. It would contribute to the further development of the cult of Osama bin Laden. It would demoralize potential defectors in Afghanistan and potential allies elsewhere in the Islamic world. These consequences would be a heavy price to pay for our "patient" pursuit of a low-grade air war against the Taliban.

And what of the price we will pay for refusing to confront Iraq--at least now, perhaps ever? We've already given Saddam time to move his chemical and biological weapons programs as far as possible out of potential harm's way, an opportunity of which he appears to have taken advantage. More important perhaps, what signal does it send to fence-sitters in the Arab world, a world that respects the decisive use of power above all, if we seem hesitant now to do the job we should have finished a decade ago?

And what signal do we send when our law enforcement and intelligence agencies desperately try to convince the press that, as Saturday's Washington Post headline put it, "FBI and CIA Suspect Domestic Extremists; Officials Doubt Any Links to Bin Laden"? Really? Was someone unrelated to bin Laden's people ready to mail anthrax spores immediately after September 11 just for the fun and chaos of it? Why was lead hijacker Mohammed Atta checking out cropdusters before September 11? And what about Atta's meetings with Iraqi agents in Prague--the last of which, in April 2001, only five months before the attack, seems to have been the centerpiece of a trip to Europe of less than a week's duration? Is the FBI and CIA's leading theory really that two elaborate and historically unprecedented and yet unrelated terrorist conspiracies, one domestic, one foreign, were simultaneously unfolding over the past year--and largely in the same states (Florida and New Jersey)?

We can try to close our eyes to the truth about Iraq in the service of the "coalition" and "patience." But we cannot win a real war on terrorism with our eyes closed.

Nor can we win on the homefront with the kind of happy talk the administration seems convinced is needed to prevent the American people from dissolving into panic. Premature efforts at reassurance and transparent efforts at spin have done more damage to Americans' confidence in their government than any outbreak of alarmism would have. One would have thought the administration had learned this lesson by the end of last week, only to read in Sunday's paper this statement by a White House official: "We want to brand Tom Ridge. When people see him, we want them to think, 'My babies are safe.'" Needless to say, people will think their babies are safe when the terrorists mailing the anthrax-laden letters are caught. "Branding" Tom Ridge won't help. But it's easier than catching the terrorists, and it's apparently also easier than simply leveling with the American people.