Kabul, Afghanistan ? One of America’s closest allies says the war on terrorism fails to address its root causes.

Experts agreed with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, saying Friday the major military offensive against the Taliban will not fix Afghanistan’s larger crises: a lack of reconstruction and jobs, a booming drug trade and a weak government.

“You won’t win unless you can convince people that progress is being made,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department analyst who’s now a scholar at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

“One of the things we recognize is that we have failed to improve on the development side, especially in the south. In the areas with the greatest need, we have not gotten the reconstruction that was necessary.”

U.S. soldiers cajole an Afghan donkey to carry supplies to their mountaintop post Thursday in south Afghanistan. The U.S.-led coalition says it has launched a fresh offensive against insurgents across four southern provinces. But the struggle to win back parts of Afghanistan's south is proving difficult, and even the nation's president is criticizing the U.S. effort.

On Thursday, a clearly frustrated Karzai criticized the coalition’s anti-terror campaign, deploring the deaths of hundreds of Afghans and appealing for more help for his government. The coalition has killed hundreds, mostly Taliban militants, since May.

Karzai spokesman Khaleeq Ahmad said Friday the president wanted the international community to re-evaluate its approach.

“We want to fight (terrorism) in a way that we fight the roots of it: where they get trained, where they get equipment, where they get money, where the recruitment centers are,” he said.

Outside Kabul, there is little visible evidence of improvements in infrastructure or services since the Taliban regime was ousted in late 2001.

That has allowed forces loyal to the hard-line Islamic regime to regain strength and sympathy in their former strongholds in the poorer southern provinces of Uruzgan, Helmand, Zabul and Kandahar.

The Taliban also is being fueled by the return of a flourishing drug trade. Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world’s heroin supply with its poppy crop, and the profits of drug trafficking are helping fund the militants.