Report indicates long road in Afghan war

WASHINGTON – The Taliban insurgency has spread to more areas of Afghanistan in recent months and violence has reached new highs, though there have been “slow and incremental” security gains in areas of the south where tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops deployed, according to a Pentagon report released Tuesday.

While NATO and Afghan forces have “increased pressure on insurgent networks over the past several months, the insurgency has proven resilient” and “will retain operational momentum in some areas” as long as the Taliban can use neighboring Pakistan and Iran as sanctuaries, the report concluded.

It added that that the number of Afghans rating security as “bad” is at its highest level since the survey began 2008, a trend the report concluded was due “to the steady increase in total violence over the past nine months.”

The sobering appraisal, which examines development from April through September and is required by Congress, contrasts with the more upbeat assessment heard in recent days from President Barack Obama and from senior military officers, who have stressed signs that the war effort is turning around and that momentum is shifting away from the Taliban.

Release of the report comes only days after Obama and other NATO leaders meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, endorsed a plan that calls for NATO troops to turn over responsibility for leading combat operations to Afghan forces by 2014, a four-year transition that reflects the magnitude of the difficulty still remaining in Afghanistan.

The 2014 date was an attempt by the White House to de-emphasize Obama’s announcement last year that U.S. forces would begin leaving Afghanistan in July 2012, a move that deepened suspicion among Afghans and others in the region that the U.S. would pull out and enable the Taliban to return to power.

That concern remains a deep source of the insurgency’s resilience and the unwillingness of many Afghans to reject the Taliban, the report argues: “The Taliban’s strength lies in the Afghan population’s perception that coalition forces will soon leave, giving credence to the belief that a Taliban victory is inevitable.”

A senior Pentagon official who briefed reporters Tuesday on the report emphasized the positive, arguing that “we’ve seen a lot of encouraging signs over the last six or seven weeks” in the period not covered by the report. But he admitted that “in no way is anybody guaranteeing success.”

The previous Afghan assessment issued by the Pentagon last June concluded that the U.S. faced “severe challenges” and found that the security situation was continuing to “deteriorate.”

The assessment released Tuesday found that security conditions over the last three months were “relatively unchanged” in the 124 districts deemed by international forces to be “key terrain.”

Three districts in the east and one in the south have seen security worsen, meaning residents and troops in those areas now face “frequent threats,” while in two more districts, in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, conditions have improved.

With nearly 100,000 US troops and nearly 50,000 other foreign forces now in Afghanistan, “we are pushing the Taliban out of the populated areas,” said a senior State Department official. But he admitted that the gains remain “fragile” and even when driven out of cities and towns, the Taliban continues to have influence.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, is said by aides to be deeply concerned that lasting gains in Afghanistan are impossible unless Pakistan’s military takes more decisive action against Afghan Taliban who have taken refuge in Pakistan’s tribal areas, including North Waziristan, and in Baluchistan, a province to the south.