Islamabad, Pakistan ? Seven years after Sept. 11, al-Qaida and its allies are gaining ground across the region where the plot was hatched, staging their most lethal attacks yet against NATO forces and posing a growing threat to the U.S.-backed governments in Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan.

While there have been no new strikes on the U.S. homeland, the Islamic insurrection inspired by Osama bin Laden has claimed thousands of casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people and shows no sign of slackening in the face of history’s most powerful military alliance.

The insurgency now stretches from Afghanistan’s border with Iran through the southern half of the country. The Taliban are now able to interdict three of the four major highways that connect Kabul, the capital, to the rest of the country.

“I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan,” Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded Tuesday before a congressional committee.

Experts inside and outside the U.S. government agreed that a key reason for the resurgence is a growing popular sympathy for the militants because an over-reliance on the use of force, especially airpower, by NATO has killed hundreds of civilians.

On Wednesday, Pakistan’s military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, warned that cross-border U.S. missile strikes and commando raids will no longer be tolerated. “The sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country will be defended at all cost,” he said.

Mullen said he is examining “a new, more comprehensive strategy for the region,” an acknowledgement that the current approach lacks coordinated reconstruction and humanitarian programs.

“We cannot kill our way to victory,” said Mullen, who warned that the United States and its allies “are running out of time.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said that efforts to capture or kill bin Laden haven’t been without “ups and downs.” But, she added, the failure to find him says “a lot about the geography … where al-Qaida decides to hide. And as the president says, Osama bin Laden is not out there leading any parades.”

The United States and its allies have killed and captured thousands of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters, including senior and mid-level leaders.

But bin Laden and his inner circle have established new bases inside Pakistan, where they plotted deadly attacks in London and Madrid, and where U.S. intelligence officials say they’re new plotting attacks and training recruits. So have Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his lieutenants, who U.S. officials said have been aided by sympathetic Pakistani military and intelligence officers.

With U.S. forces stretched by the war in Iraq, NATO allies unwilling to commit large numbers of soldiers and the Afghan security forces unable to operate independently, U.S. commanders have too few men to contain the revival of the Taliban and its allies.

This year the Taliban have carried out their most lethal attacks against foreign troops, launching coordinated strikes in different areas that combine regular attackers and suicide bombers.

The most serious came last month when over a two-day period the insurgents hit a major U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan with at least 10 suicide bombers and a ground force and ambushed a French-Afghan patrol near Kabul. At least 10 elite French paratroopers were killed and 21 injured, the worst loss of NATO troops in a single incident.

Despite killing many more civilians than the allies have, the insurgents are also winning the all important “information war” for the hearts and minds of the region’s deeply religious Muslims, U.S. military officials conceded.

The insurgents’ sophisticated propaganda machinery exaggerates civilian casualties caused by foreign forces and reinforces perceptions fueled by U.S. abuses against captured detainees that the Bush administration is waging a war against Islam.