WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is asking Congress for time to see whether a revamped war plan for Afghanistan is taking hold and does not rule out adding more American forces to help turn around a war widely assessed as a stalemate.

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James Jones, a retired Marine general with experience in Afghanistan, said the United States will know by the end of next year whether the strategy President Barack Obama announced in March is working. In the meantime the White House is redefining how it will measure progress, with new benchmarks expected next month. The outline will be presented to Congress with an eye to creeping skepticism among many Democrats about the war’s prognosis and costs.

Making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, said the war is not now in crisis but did little to dispel the growing expectation that Obama would soon be asked to supplement the 21,000 additional forces he already approved for Afghanistan this year.

“We won’t rule anything out,” but the new strategy is too fresh for a full evaluation, Jones said.

“If things come up where we need to adjust one way or the other, and it involves troops or it involves more incentives ... for economic development or better assistance to help the Afghan government function, we’ll do that,” he added.

The United States has spent more than $220 billion since the U.S.-led invasion of 2001, plus billions more toward aid and development projects. By the United States’ own admission, much of the aid money was wasted.

Members of the House Appropriations Committee wrote recently that they are worried about “the prospects for an open-ended U.S. commitment to bring stability to a country that has a decades-long history of successfully rebuffing foreign military intervention and attempts to influence internal politics.”

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Sunday he does not know how Congress would react to a new request for additional troops.

“It depends on what the facts and the arguments are,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. “It depends what our commanders in the field say. It depends also I think in part what our NATO allies are willing to do.”

Appearing with him, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned against repeating what he called the mistake of committing too few troops to Iraq at the start of that war.

“My message to my Democratic colleagues is that we made mistakes in Iraq. Let’s not ’Rumsfeld’ Afghanistan,” Graham said, referring to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld resisted sending a very large U.S. force at the outset of the Iraq war in 2003.

The Obama plan is supposed to combine a more vigorous military campaign against the Taliban with a commitment to protect Afghan civilians and starve the insurgents of sanctuary and popular support. It envisions a large development effort led by civilians, which has not fully happened, and a rapid expansion of the Afghan armed forces to eventually take over responsibility for security.

An American military official in Kabul said Monday that drug traffickers who help fund the Afghan insurgency are on a list of militant leaders targeted by the U.S. military.

“The list of targets are those that are contributing to the insurgency, so the key leadership, and part of that obviously is the link between the narco industry and the militants,” said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the top U.S. spokesman in Afghanistan.

Smith declined to say how many drug traffickers or militants are on the list. The New York Times reported in its Monday edition that the military has a list of 367 “kill or capture” targets in Afghanistan, including 50 targets who straddle the drug trade and insurgency. The Times cited a report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the newspaper said would be released this week.

The newly installed top U.S. general in Afghanistan is preparing an interim assessment that is expected to be a sober accounting of the difficulties of fighting an entrenched and technically capable insurgency eight years into the war. Gen. Stanley McChrystal is expected to identify shortfalls that should be filled by more forces — perhaps a mix of Afghan, NATO and U.S.

His report had been expected this week but is now delayed at least until after the Afghan national elections on Aug. 20. U.S. officials have said they are neutral on the election’s outcome so long as voting comes off smoothly and with a minimum of irregularities.

In an interview published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, McChrystal said Taliban militants are gaining the upper hand as they move beyond their traditional strongholds in southern Afghanistan to threaten other regions.

“It’s a very aggressive enemy right now,” he said in his office in Kabul.

McChrystal said the U.S. would change its strategy and increase the troop presence in heavily populated areas, like the southern city of Kandahar.

Violence has spiked this year, with roadside bombs the militants’ weapon of choice. There are relatively few direct firefights. There are signs the Taliban is pursuing a classic tactic of a smaller, weaker enemy waiting out a larger, militarily superior one.

Deaths among U.S. and other NATO troops have soared. With 74 foreign troops killed — including 43 Americans — July was the deadliest month for international forces since the start of the war in 2001.

There are currently 62,000 U.S. troops and 39,000 allied forced in Afghanistan, on top of about 175,000 Afghan soldiers and police. Some NATO countries plan to withdraw their troops in the next couple of years, even as the U.S. expands its presence.

Jones appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Levin and Graham were on CBS.