9/11 Seven Years Later: US "Safe," South Asia in Turmoil
Wednesday 10 September 2008
by: Jonathan S. Landay and Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers
Islamabad, Pakistan - Seven years after 9/11, al Qaida and its allies are gaining ground across the region where the plot was hatched, staging their most lethal attacks yet against NATO forces and posing a growing threat to the U.S.-backed governments in Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
While there have been no new strikes on the U.S. homeland, the Islamic insurrection inspired by Osama bin Laden has claimed thousands of casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people and shows no sign of slackening in the face of history's most powerful military alliance.
The insurgency now stretches from Afghanistan's border with Iran through the southern half of the country. The Taliban now are able to interdict three of the four major highways that connect Kabul, the capital, to the rest of the country.
"I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan," Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded before a congressional committee on Tuesday.
Experts inside and outside the U.S. government agreed that a key reason for the resurgence is a growing popular sympathy for the militants because an over-reliance on the use of force, especially airpower, by NATO has killed hundreds of civilians.
http://www.truthout.org/article/911-seven-years-later-al-qaeda-gaining-ground
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