TALLIL AIR BASE, Iraq U.S. and Iraqi commanders sat side by side earlier this week and described their biggest problems to Robert Gates, the visiting U.S. defense secretary.

For Staff Maj. Gen. Habib al-Hussani, the commander of the 10th Iraqi Army Division, the trouble was not enough equipment for patrols on the border with Iran. For Col. Peter Newell, the commander of the first American advisory brigade to Iraqi troops, it was something else.

The hardest thing to do sometimes, he told Gates, is step back and not be in charge.

Newell was talking about the major tactical shift here since June 30, when most U.S. combat forces withdrew to bases outside the cities and left the Iraqis to lead. But he was also reflecting a change in the U.S. militarys mentality about Iraq: The 6-year-old war is no longer the center of the action, but, as Fridays string of bombings at Baghdad mosques demonstrated, there is always the prospect of renewed violence.

Even so, the battle and much of the militarys focus has moved on to Afghanistan.

The shift is evident in the numbers. If the current schedule holds, there will be 50,000 or fewer U.S. troops in Iraq next year but about 68,000 Afghanistan. The next big debate facing the Pentagon and the White House is whether to send even more troops than planned to Afghanistan; a civilian advisory panel has already advised that.

The Pentagon already anticipates spending less next year in Iraq than in Afghanistan, $61 billion compared with $65 billion, the first time that will have happened since 2003. There are still some 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, more than twice as many as in Afghanistan, but the shift in focus is clear. At the Pentagon, the top equipment priority this year is buying more than 5,000 all-terrain armored vehicles designed for the rugged landscape of Afghanistan. At the Tampa, Fla., headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees both wars, there are 90 intelligence analysts assigned to Iraq and 130 to Afghanistan. At Camp Lejeune, N.C., the Marines are offering a new yearlong crash course in Pashto, Dari and Urdu, languages spoken in Afghanistan.

And although there are still hundreds of people at the Pentagon who work on Iraq, nowhere is there anything like the tight corps of 400 top officers and soldiers many of them veterans of Iraq hand-picked by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.