Well, the Afghan government is trying to extend its reach beyond Kabul:
[Afghan President] Karzai's calls for a law-abiding, multiethnic government appear to enjoy wide popular support across Afghanistan, but he has no national army to enforce his orders. Early opposition in Washington stymied his repeated requests that an international peacekeeping force be expanded beyond Kabul.
Militia leaders still rule large swaths of the country as their personal fiefs, using customs duties, local taxes and in some cases opium trafficking to raise their own armies.
Aid groups have complained that the sway of those leaders has been bolstered by a Pentagon policy of hiring warlord's soldiers to aid U.S. forces in the hunt for the remnants of al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Oh, wait, that was in November of 2002. How are things going now? Well, warlords still control most of the country and the Taliban has been having a violent resurgence in the Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan. The Pashtun are the largest of Afghanistan's ethnic/tribal groups:
Two facts seem incontrovertible. One is that the violence has increased in almost direct proportion to the efforts of the 11,000 American troops who are in southern and eastern Afghanistan, trying to "eliminate al-Qaida". Careless bombing and heavy-handed US tactics by ground troops when they search villages are making more enemies than friends.
The other is that, fairly or not, a large number of Pashtun still feel they lost out when the Taliban regime collapsed.
Oh, and we've haven't gotten Bin Laden "dead-or-alive" yet, as the President promised. But the 11,000 US soldiers publicly acknowledged to be in Afghanistan (more than during the war we "won") are trying to prevent al-Qaeda from making profits from Afghanistan's thriving opium traffic.
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