Taliban Ready if Afghan Government Fails, Analyst Warns

Source: New York Times

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Afghanistan's government must fight corruption and quickly deliver services to Afghans, because Taliban militants are filling gaps and winning support to their cause, a top counter-insurgency expert said on Monday.

The Taliban were already running courts, hospitals and even an ombudsman in parallel to the government, making a real difference to local people, said David Kilcullen, a senior adviser to U.S. commander General Stanley McChrystal.

"A government that is losing to a counter-insurgency isn't being outfought, it is being out-governed. And that's what's happening in Afghanistan," Kilcullen told Australia's National Press Club.

Afghanistan has been in a state of political limbo since August 20 presidential elections, with partial results so far placing President Hamid Karzai in the lead, but not by enough to avoid a second round against his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah. But the election, which the Taliban failed to disrupt with rocket attacks, has been marred by allegations of fraud with around a third of the votes counted.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/08/31/world/international-uk-afghanistan-election-australia.html

Kill everybody who doesn't want to live in the 7th century.

did`t cheney invite them to the usa for pipeline talks and did`t they turn down cheney`s proposal? did`t the taliban and the al queda basically hated each other?

it`s time to face the facts....it`s an illegal war that we will never win.

Source: The Times (UK)

Widespread and systematic fraud during the Afghan presidential elections has tarnished the legitimacy of any future government and undermined the Nato campaign there, Western and Afghan officials have admitted.

=snip=

David Kilcullen, one of the architects of Nato’s anti-insurgency campaign, said that *the failure of the Afghan Government to provide basic services in many areas was allowing the Taleban to establish its own courts, hospitals and security. “A government that is losing to a counter-insurgency isn’t being outfought, it is being outgoverned,” he said.

There have been more than 2,500 complaints about the August 20 vote, 691 of them involving serious charges of vote rigging, meaning that they could affect the overall outcome of the election.

One international election observer, who asked not to be named, said: “The pattern is of systematic and widespread fraud, which really does call into question the legitimacy of the election. This is large scale and it is across the country.”

Read more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6816479.ece

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* This is the crux of the problem and Obama better get a grip on it fast otherwise he'll have no other choice but to pull out.

"A government that is losing to a counter-insurgency isn't being outfought, it is being out-governed" Wow. That seems to state the situation so clearly. While we drive our tanks through the farmers' fields, the Taliban is offering services that actually help their countrymen. So much for our battle for hearts and minds.