Brit battalion to move from KAF to Helmand/Taliban strengthening/Who's the US fighting?

Further to this post,

500 more British troops for Afstan announced--with maybes

some details:

...
As The Daily Telegraph reported last week, a total of 1,000 more British soldiers will go to Helmand province. Five hundred will be new troops from Britain. The remainder is a British battle group currently deployed in Kandahar province under international command.

The Prime Minister said the Kandahar battle group was being redeployed “to meet the changing demands of the campaign, which require greater concentration of our forces in central Helmand”...

That is actually the Black Watch battalion, which has been based at KAF as a quick reaction force for Regional Command South as a whole. So their replacement battalion will be an integral part of the British force at Helmand [the unit is in fact the 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh].

As for the enemy:

Taliban strength in Afghanistan nears military proportion

A recent U.S. intelligence assessment has raised the estimated number of full-time Taliban-led insurgents fighting in Afghanistan to at least 25,000, underscoring how the crisis has worsened even as the U.S. and its allies have beefed up their military forces, a U.S. official said Thursday.

The U.S. official, who requested anonymity because the assessment is classified, said the estimate represented an increase of at least 5,000 fighters, or 25 percent, over what an estimate found last year.

On Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry assured Afghans that America would continue to fight until "extremists and insurgents" were defeated in the war-torn nation [really? see below].

The new intelligence estimate suggests such a fight would be difficult. Not included in the 25,000 tally are the part-time fighters - those Afghans who plant bombs or support the insurgents in other ways in return for money - and also the criminal gangs who sometimes make common cause with the Taliban or other Pakistan-based groups.

The assessment attributed the growth in the Taliban and their major allies, such as the Haqqani Network and Hezb-e-Islami, to a number of factors, including a growing sense among many Afghans that the insurgents are gaining ground over U.S.-led NATO troops and Afghan security forces [emphasis added]...

Secretary of State Clinton yesterday:

...
Part of the problem...was "to sort out who is the real enemy. Our goal is to disrupt, dismantle, defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies. But not every Taliban is al Qaeda."..

Nobody has ever equated the Taliban with al Qaeda. Ms. Clinton, contrary to the ambassador, did not speak of "insurgents". Hardly reassuring to Afghans opposed to the Talibs. Still with Washington:

U.S. officials look at scenarios for Afghanistan 'middle path'
The strategies under consideration would require fewer additional troops than requested by Gen. McChrystal.

Meanwhile, across the border more enemies who are also not al Qaeda:

Wave of Deadly Attacks in Pakistan