Afghanistan War: A measure of Bush's success

From The True Failure of Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ by Ivo Daalder TPM Cafe 09/27/06:

A spate of recent articles, including the excellent piece by Jon Landay ... and a stellar report by David Rhode in the New York Times, attests to the fact that Afghanistan is once again becoming the place it was before the Taliban was toppled almost five years ago: a place where jihadists of all stripes can train and engage in terrorism against infidels of all kinds.  Since, as the NIE notes, the same dynamic is also taking place in Iraq, we now have two Afghanistans instead of one.  That’s the true measure of Bush’s failure.   (my emphasis)

I couldn't locate the David Rhode article he references.  The Landay article is Five years into Afghanistan, U.S. confronts Taliban's comeback by Jonathan Landay, McClatchy Newspapers 09/26/06.  Landay reports:

Afghanistan has become Iraq on a slow burn. Five years after they were ousted, the Taliban are back in force, their ranks renewed by a new generation of diehards. Violence, opium trafficking, ethnic tensions, official corruption and political anarchy are all worse than they've been at any time since the U.S.-led intervention in 2001.

By failing to stop Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden from escaping into Pakistan, then diverting troops and resources to Iraq before finishing the job in Afghanistan, the Bush administration left the door open to a Taliban comeback. Compounding the problem, reconstruction efforts have been slow and limited, and the U.S. and NATO didn't anticipate the extent and ferocity of the Taliban resurgence or the alliances the insurgents have formed with other Islamic extremists and with the world's leading opium traffickers.

There are only 42,000 U.S. and NATO-led troops to secure a country that's half again the size of Iraq, where 150,000 U.S.-led coalition troops are deployed. Suicide bombings have soared from two in all of 2002 to about one every five days. Civilian casualties are mounting. President Hamid Karzai and his U.S. backers have become hugely unpopular.

Lindsay's article also reports on continuing complicity of the Pakistani intelligence agency (ISI) with the Taliban:

Taliban leaders quietly re-established bases and training camps in Pakistan's border areas, where they were welcomed by Pashtun tribes, and rebuilt their ranks with religious students recruited from among the 2.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

They also received money and weapons from al-Qaida and from sympathetic current and former officers of Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), according to current and former U.S., European and Afghan officials, commanders and experts.

U.S. intelligence has significant evidence of ISI complicity, said Seth Jones, an expert at the RAND Corp., a think tank that advises the U.S. government. Middle- and junior-level ISI officers are providing the Taliban with intelligence and have foiled several U.S. operations by tipping the insurgents off in advance, he said.