U.S. Military Official: Afghanistan War Trend Worse Than Iraq

Well, this is coming from the horse's mouth so we better listen to him. Here's the bad news:

"Afghanistan (is) in my eyes an under-resourced war, a war that needs a whole lot more advisers, a whole lot more economic aid," Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl told a security conference in Stockholm.
"This war is the war I'm concerned about, a war in which the United States very much needs the help of our friends."

Now, there has been a lot of news of late regarding the need of more NATO forces in Afghanistan and I'm not going to rehash that. One thing very interesting in this piece from Reuters, is a difference that Lt. Col. Nagl finds between Iraq and Afghanistan. Read this carefully:

"I've worked with the Afghan security forces a little bit. I find them to be diligent and dedicated and trainable (but) not particularly well educated ... The Iraqi security forces are far more advanced than are the Afghans," he said.
"The Taliban did extraordinarily harmful things to the intelligentsia of the country. The people you need to run a country no longer exist."

Amazing angle he is taking here. This is an aftereffect of the Taliban rule that no one (that I've seen) has ever really addressed and that was the intellectual and educational obliteration of the populace. This is what we are fighting against - it's not just the bloodthirsty nature of the Taliban and jihadists, it is what they do in the name of their "religion." When the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan, it appears they put in place a system to not only hold the people under their control but to ensure that the people did not rise up, they essentially dismantled the education system of the country.

This just goes to show the ruin a jihadist run government will have on a country. And it's just another page in the book of "Why We Have To End Jihadism Today."

Afghan war trend worse than Iraq: U.S. trainer

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - The tide of the war in Afghanistan is running against the United States and its allies, in contrast to an improving trend in Iraq, a U.S. military official and counter-insurgency expert said on Wednesday.

Speaking to reporters, he drew a sharp contrast between developments in the two countries.
"My analysis is that al Qaeda in Iraq has essentially been defeated. That doesn't mean they can't come back but they really played their cards enormously poorly, I think," Nagl said.
He said the turning of Sunni tribal leaders against al Qaeda, and the merging of their militia into government security forces, were important signs of progress.

In Afghanistan, he said, "the trends are not in the right direction. The number of suicide attacks was up dramatically in 2007, 2007 was a record year for opium production (which) obviously funds the larger Pashto-based insurgency."
Afghanistan has faced rising violence in the past two years, the bloodiest period since U.S.-led and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban government in late 2001.