Taliban insurgents once derided as a ragtag rabble unable to match US troops have transformed into a lethal fighting force — one advanced enough to mount massive conventional attacks and claim US lives at a record pace.
The US military suffered its 101st death of the year in Afghanistan last week when Sergeant 1st Class David Todd died of gunfire wounds while helping train Afghan police in the northwest.
The total number of US dead last year — 111 — was a record itself and is likely to be surpassed.
Top US generals, European presidents and analysts say the blame lies to the east, in militant sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan.
They say as long as those areas remain havens where fighters arm, train, recruit and plot increasingly sophisticated ambushes, the Afghan war will continue to sour.
“The US is now losing the war against the Taliban,” Anthony Cordesman, of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a report on Thursday.
A resurgent al-Qaeda, which was harbored by the Taliban in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, could soon follow, Cordesman warned.
Cordesman called on the US to treat Pakistani territory as a combat zone if Pakistan does not act.
“Pakistan may officially be an ally, but much of its conduct has effectively made it a major threat to US strategic interests,” he said.
An influx of Chechen, Turkish, Uzbek and Arab fighters have helped increase the Taliban’s military precision, including an ambush by 100 fighters last week that killed 10 French soldiers, and a rush on a US outpost last month by 200 militants that killed nine US soldiers.
Multi-direction attacks, flawlessly executed ambushes and increasingly powerful roadside and suicide bombs mean the US and 40-nation NATO-led force will in all likelihood suffer its deadliest year in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on a visit to Kabul last week, said he knows that something must “be raised with Pakistan’s government, and I will continue to do so.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who rushed to Afghanistan after the French attack, warned on Thursday that “terrorism is winning.”
“Military sanctuaries are expanding in the [Pakistani] tribal areas,” General David McKiernan, the US four-star general in charge of the 50,000-strong NATO-led force here, said last week.
McKiernan has called for another three brigades of US forces — roughly 10,000 troops — to bolster the 33,000 strong US force in Afghanistan.
Complicating relations between the Afghan government and the US, last week a joint Afghan-US military operation in Herat Province killed around 90 civilians, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s office said. The US said it was investigating the incident.
US critics of the Afghan government are becoming more vocal.
Representative Jim Marshall, a Democrat who is a member of the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, said last week that Karzai’s government “is not nearly where it should be.”
“I’m not willing to have a long-term US commitment, a substantial US commitment to Afghanistan without seeing substantial reform and improvement in the government,” Marshall said on a visit to Kabul.
Karzai’s influence barely extends outside the capital. The Interior Ministry is seen as uniformly corrupt, and opium poppy cultivation has soared in recent years.
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