Washington ? President Bush vowed Thursday to make a sustained new military and political effort to beat back resurgent Taliban forces as he turned his attention back to Afghanistan and a conflict that has been overshadowed for the past couple years by the larger war in Iraq.

Bush announced that he will continue a temporary increase of 3,200 U.S. troops in Afghanistan “for the foreseeable future” and urged Congress to give him $11.8 billion more to accelerate training, reconstruction and counternarcotics programs. He also insisted that NATO allies should drop restrictions on their forces in Afghanistan and join the fight against Islamic extremists.

“America and our allies are going to stand with these folks,” the president said in an address to the American Enterprise Institute. “That’s the message I want to deliver to the Afghanistan people today. Free debates are important. But our commitment is strong. We will train you, we will help you, and we will stand with you as you defend your new democracy.”

The speech was the first Bush has devoted to Afghanistan during his second term, reflecting the shifting priorities in Washington as the Iraq war has turned increasingly violent and consumed more of the president’s attention. But though Iraq dominated the debate, remnants of the ousted Taliban government have regrouped and launched a potent new challenge. Attacks on U.S., Afghan and other coalition forces nearly tripled last year, and the Taliban by some estimates controls four times as much territory as in 2005.

“The focus on Iraq has definitely diminished not just the amount of resources that can be applied … but it’s also a question of the time and attention that top policymakers can spend on the problem,” said James Dobbins, a former special envoy to Afghanistan who now works as a national security analyst at the Rand Corp. “Iraq has tended to suck the air out of the system for the last couple of years.”

A 3,200-member brigade from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division that was scheduled to come home in February will, instead, stay for another four months. And the Pentagon said this week that the 173rd Airborne Brigade, originally slated to head to Iraq, will then replace it, increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 27,000. In his speech, Bush expressed a commitment to make that increase indefinite.