We Are Losing the War in Afghanistan: Taliban are coming back to the front

The United States and its allies have been forced to launch their biggest military operation of the war in Afghanistan because in the 55 months since ousting the Taliban movement from power, they neglected to establish minimal security or governance in the country's south, analysts say.

That failure has let the Taliban walk back in through an open door, say Afghan and foreign officials in Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar. Afghan officials estimate thousands of Taliban guerrillas, many recently infiltrated from Pakistan, are in the five southernmost provinces, where their attacks culminated this spring in a spasm of bombings, ambushes and assassinations against scattered government targets.

US-led coalition forces launched a counteroffensive last week that they said will involve 11,000 Afghan and Western troops, in an effort to stabilise the south this summer before US commanders hand that region over to an arriving Nato force...

The reality in the south looks far nastier. Because of the Taliban's spread, United Nations agencies, which a few years ago operated freely over 60 per cent to 70 per cent of southernmost Afghanistan, now can work readily in only six of the region's 50 districts, or counties, said UN regional director Talatbek Masadykov. The Taliban have established parallel authorities, including courts, in wide areas of the south and people are turning to them to solve conflicts, say Afghan press reports and UN officials...

In late May, Afghan and US forces battled hundreds of Taliban in villages barely 10 miles west of Kandahar. City residents say armed Taliban patrol their outer neighbourhoods, warning people not to send their children to government schools. Last year, guerrillas burned or shut down more than 100 schools in Kandahar province...

As in much of Afghanistan, perhaps the most glaring failure of rebuilding is the police. Most police, recruited locally and untrained, are not paid regularly, and significant numbers are deserting, officials and Kandahar residents said.

Even in districts where policemen face strong Taliban forces, the policemen don't have a second clip of ammunition for their rifles, said an Afghan security official in Kabul. "The coalition is ramping up now to build up the police force. But that's four years too late."


http://gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/world/10048548.html

keep the Taliban from taking back the place.

its head in the sand...

It's like toadstools. They cleared what was above ground, but left the mycelium growing in rotting straw and dung. So you get more toadstools.

Can't touch the mycelium. It's a mycelium of peace and tolerance, and a growing medium of justice. But they consistently push up deadly toadstools.

Deal with the problem, or deal with the symptoms over and over and over.

and a network of warlord/druglord alliances wasn't going to work after all.

No need to learn history, we just repeat it.

"want it" more than we do.

the tribal chieftans will take whomever gives them the most. They have a code that is preislamic and probably see the Arabs and the West as peas in a pod, someone from whom to get ammo/cash and then leave us the eff alone!
The NW Frontier area of Pakistan is about as Afghan as Pakistani. They don't care about Karachi or Islaamabad, just give us money and leave us alone...
Artificial countries are hard to unite, even France was not really France until a common enemy was found in Germany. Even Britain has its peeps who would rather die than be called "English" instead of Cornish or Welsh or Scottish. WWI solved a lot of the outright hostility in the UK, France and the US towards regionality. But that has not helped in Iraq -- as artificial country as there ever has been, and certainly not in Afghanistan, which is only united in that noone wants the West or Russians or Indians to be their masters.
Will they ever be united? Don't know. When one thought the anti-Catalan movement of Franco had run its tide, it seems that the Catalans want all the Andulusian immigrants to "be like the Catalans".
What is an Afghan? Who teaches their children and gives them a modicum of stability as well as a goal to attain? Well, it ain't the Northern Coalition or the Kabul government of the Western Allies, it is the Taliban...

:sarcasm: sort of

That leaving much of the country in the hands of the warlords who drove people to support the taliban in the first place was a good idea?

The * administration's policy on Afghanistan seems like a bored teenager forced to clean their bedroom. They do the bare minimum necessary, throwing dirty clothes under the bed, cramming junk in drawers and cupboards, enough to give the appearance that the room is tidy. Yet scratch the surface a little, open a cupboard or drawer, and the whole place crashes down around your ankles.

* declared victory and moved on to his real target, leaving Afghanistan with an outward appearance of normality and stability but nothing had really changed there, the front lines just moved away from the cameras.

this wasn't even an "occupation," like Iraq.

we never controlled anything except our own bases, a few square blocks in Kabul and whatever acreage we happened to be bombing at the moment.

You might as well put on your swimming trunks and go "invade" the ocean, expecting to win the "war" against wetness.