Word: talibanize
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...Even if your planned escalation against the Taliban manages to avoid a replay of the Soviet experience, it will gain you little or nothing in the war against international terror. This is because the Taliban have neither the intent nor the capability to engage in significant terror actions against the United States outside of Afghanistan itself. Our terror target should be Al Qaeda, but they are now of course based inside Pakistan. Only the government of Pakistan is positioned to deal them a mortal blow, and accomplishing that goal should be your priority, but your influence in Pakistan will decline...
...military officers are already making clear that many of the additional 20,000 U.S. troops bound for Afghanistan in the coming year won't be headed to the Afghan-Pakistani border, where the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies are launching regular and deadly attacks against U.S. and allied troops. Instead, they'll be concentrated on defending the capital, Kabul, from Taliban attacks and also on reinforcing British troops in Helmand and other parts of the south. That will do little to assuage the criticism that the limited U.S. and NATO deployments in Afghanistan have left Afghan President Hamid Karzai...
...troop surge in Iraq may have helped restore relative security there, but the same period has seen a shocking deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan: the Taliban, which controlled 54% of Afghanistan in 2007, now controls about 72% of the country, according to a new study from the Paris-based International Council on Security and Development, one of the few independent groups that keeps full-time staffers in the country. That's why U.S. and civilian casualties have spiked in Afghanistan lately, after years of being eclipsed by the bloodshed in Iraq. There are currently about 32,000 U.S. troops...
...scattered the Taliban in the invasion launched a month after the 9/11 attacks but then turned its attention and resources toward Iraq. "As seven years of missed opportunity have rolled by, the Taliban has rooted itself across increasing swaths of Afghan territory," the independent report says. "The increase in their geographic spread illustrates that the Taliban's political, military and economic strategies are now more successful than the West's in Afghanistan. Confident in their expansion beyond the rural south, the Taliban are at the gates of the capital and infiltrating the city at will...
...authorities providing their own security - means the national government's security apparatus can be much smaller," Biddle says. The bad news, of course, is that many such provincial officials are little more than warlords, who often profit from trafficking in opium. The United Nations estimated last month that the Taliban and its allies - including some of those provincial officials - could clear nearly $500 million in the drug trade this year. If the U.S. and its allies need to find a way to bring home their troops while leaving behind a modicum of security, they may find themselves forced to settle...