Afstan: US intelligence warns of long, hard slog

Only to be expected, but US officials are certainly franker than ours.

Al-Qaeda's influence and numbers are rapidly growing in Afghanistan, with fighters operating from new havens and mimicking techniques learned on the Iraqi battlefield for use against U.S. and allied troops, the directors of the CIA and defense intelligence told Congress yesterday.

Five years after the United States drove al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the CIA, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that both groups are back, waging a "bloody insurgency" in the south and east of the country. U.S. support for the Kabul government of Hamid Karzai will be needed for "at least a decade" to ensure that the country does not fall again, he said...

...Hayden and Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, painted a stark portrait of a struggling Afghanistan and a successful al-Qaeda capable of operating on two battlefields.

"The direct tissue between Iraq and Afghanistan is al-Qaeda," said Hayden, who visited both countries recently. "The lessons learned in Iraq are being applied to Afghanistan."..

Hayden told the Senate panel that the Taliban, aided by al-Qaeda, "has built momentum this year" in Afghanistan and that "the level of violence associated with the insurgency has increased significantly." He also noted that Karzai's government "is nowhere to be seen" in many rural areas where a lack of security is affecting millions of Afghans for whom the quality of life has not advanced since the U.S. military arrived in October 2001.

Maples said the insurgency "had strengthened its capabilities and influence" with its base among Pashtun communities in the south, as violence this year has almost doubled since 2005...

The two intelligence chiefs said that al-Qaeda, through propaganda and attacks, has been increasingly successful in defining Afghanistan and Iraq as critical battlegrounds against the West.

"We have radical groups like al-Qaeda and its affiliates sponsoring terrorists, insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere that seem to be able to preempt governments and eclipse the moderate actors in the region...

I think the emphasis on al Qaeda is some spinning for the American audience; my impression is that the Taliban can operate and gain support pretty well without much help from al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail continues to play Cassandra (not that the Afghan National Army does not have very serious problems): "Army woefully unready, Afghans say".

Update: Just to add to the confusion, a poll (released Nov. 9) of Afghans from the Asia Foundation that still is positive, but less so than two years ago:

The survey is separated into seven different categories and opens with findings on the overall national mood in Afghanistan in 2006, which states that 44% of Afghans think the country is headed in the right direction, 21% feel it is moving in the wrong direction, 29% had mixed feelings, and 4% were unsure. This is in comparison to The Asia Foundation's 2004 survey, "Democracy in Afghanistan," when 64% of Afghans believed the country was headed in the right direction, 11% felt it was moving in the wrong direction, 8% had mixed feelings, and 16% were unsure...