A Reality Check on the Afghanstan Insurgency

AP reports today on a Rand Corp study entitled "Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan".

From AP: "It said NATO officials have uncovered several instances of Pakistani intelligence agents providing information to Taliban fighters, even "tipping off Taliban forces about the location and movement of Afghan and coalition forces, which undermined several U.S. and NATO anti-Taliban military operations." No timeframes were given.

The report said Pakistan's intelligence service and other government agencies provided Taliban and other insurgents with training at camps in Pakistan, as well as intelligence, financial assistance and help crossing the border."

(Does Julie Couillard have any contact with people in the Pakistan Consulate General in Montreal? They're just at 3421 Peel downtown. But I digress.)

The whole document from Rand is available for anyone willing to dig in to the 177 pages of it.

Which pretty effectively excludes anyone in either the Harper government or the national media. Their narratives are already decided upon.

What's interesting to me about the document is that for all intents and purposes it is a tacit acknowledgment that after 6 years the problems have only become more intractable not less.

But we knew that.

Added later: Nukes and Spooks, which I mentioned first here, add another layer of intel to the Afghanistan puzzle today. NightWatch is a service of AFCEA Intelligence.

Recently NightWatch published a special report on April and May in Afghanistan. As Jonathan Landay says, "it makes chilling reading".

""An increase in attacks in and around Kabul is particularly noteworthy because it indicates a physical and psychological worsening of the security situation," says the report. "For the second time in two years, in May Kabul was one of the regions under the greatest stress. Moreover, there is a slow increase in the number of attacks and area of fighting in the provinces directly bordering Kabul."

"Kabul is becoming slowly surrounded," it says."

The report is here.

I know I get tiresome going on and bloody on as I do about the laziness and incuriousness of our national media but you'd think that when acknowledged expertise is freely available at least one of the semi-comatose, drunken layabouts in the national media would take notice.

Yet they don't.

And then they whine when we comment on their laziness.

A pox on all their houses.