Even Kabul is close to being threatened. Chalk up another botched mission by Team Bush and his boot-licking Tony Blair. If the US wants to be a leader, it's going to have to actually lead and not run away as we've seen in Afghanistan. Moving troops out of Afghanistan and into Iraq is coming back to haunt us. It's only a matter of time before the Bush crowd starts complaining again about NATO needing to send more troops when in fact, it was the US who abandoned this war. Mission Accomplished?
The Taliban has a permanent presence in 54% of Afghanistan and the country is in serious danger of falling into Taliban hands, according to a report by an independent thinktank with long experience in the area.
Despite tens of thousands of Nato-led troops and billions of dollars in aid poured into the country, the insurgents, driven out by the American invasion in 2001, now control "vast swaths of unchallenged territory, including rural areas, some district centres, and important road arteries", the Senlis Council says in a report released yesterday.
On the basis of what it calls exclusive research, it warns that the insurgency is also exercising a "significant amount of psychological control, gaining more and more political legitimacy in the minds of the Afghan people who have a long history of shifting alliances and regime change".
