Taliban, Al-Qaeda regroup in Afghanistan, defying U.S. strategy

[Veronica.Franco]

Taliban and al-Qaeda forces are rising in number and increasingly using roadside bombs and suicide strikes. Last year was the deadliest yet for U.S. forces there and attacks are at their highest level since 2001, when the Taliban regime that harbored al-Qaeda was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion.

``We have lost a lot of the ground that we may have gained in the country, especially in the South,” Afghanistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Said Jawad, said in an interview. The fact that U.S. military resources have been ``diverted” to the war in Iraq ``is of course hurting Afghanistan,” he said.

The escalating violence is reviving questions about President George W. Bush’s decision to make Iraq the central front in the war on terrorism. Instability in Afghanistan could allow Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network to regroup there, analysts said.

``Afghanistan is a wild, tribal place in which the various armed actors take advantage of any decrease in pressure,” said W. Patrick Lang, former chief Middle East analyst at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. ``We pulled troops out and put them in Iraq and that took pressure off. I don’t think the U.S. effort there backsliding should come as any surprise.”

Some experts on defense policy and the region say that confidence is misplaced. ``They absolutely miscalculated from the beginning,” said Barney Rubin, director of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. ``We don’t have enough forces where they should” be, and ``that has absolutely led to insurgency,” said Rubin, who visited Afghanistan last month.

Nazif Shahrani, a professor of Central Asian and Middle East Studies at Indiana University at Bloomington who focuses on Afghanistan, said, ``If we were serious about the war on terror we should have focused our efforts on fighting a more effective war on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

``Instead,” he added, ``we focused on Iraq and that gave the Taliban and al-Qaeda time to regroup and find money and weapons.”

http://www.onlinenews.com.pk/details.php?id=97378

You've done a heck of a job, Mr war president.