A US Marine secures an opium poppy field in southwest Afghanistan
Attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan are at record levels and threaten to derail efforts to rebuild the war-torn country, while an unholy alliance of Taliban drug dealers and corrupt government officials has made a mockery of coalition forces' attempts to stem the export of heroin.
The findings, from new reports looking at the current situation in Afghanistan, highlight key areas in which, contrary to the assurances of Western military leaders, the war is being lost.
A series of secret Government documents have also laid bare the "appalling" errors that contributed to Britain's failure in Iraq. On the eve of the Chilcot Inquiry into the operation to remove Saddam Hussein, The Sunday Telegraph claimed it had hundreds of pages of documents setting out "significant shortcomings" at all levels of the mission.
The papers are believed to reveal that Tony Blair was planning for an invasion more than a year before it took place, and detail supply problems which left some troops going into action with only five bullets each, while others had to travel to the war-zone on commercial airlines.
In Afghanistan, there were nearly 13,000 attacks between January and the end of August this year – more than two-and-a-half times the number experienced during the same period last year and a fivefold increase on the total in 2005. "The most recent data available, as of August 2009, showed the highest rate of enemy-initiated attacks since Afghanistan's security situation began to deteriorate," according to a new study published by the US Government Accountability Office this month.
The ferocity of the fighting has seen almost 100 British service personnel killed and more than 400 wounded since the start of this year. According to the report, distributed to the US Congress and senior Pentagon officials, security has "deteriorated significantly" since 2005, "affecting all aspects of US and allied reconstruction". A resurgent Taliban, weak Afghan security forces, a thriving drug trade and threats from safe havens in Pakistan are all cited as factors...
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