Afghan war to loom large for new U.S. leader
As Western military commanders struggle to find a winning strategy, the Taliban makes gains and ordinary Afghans feel less secure.
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — The next U.S. leader will inherit a war in Afghanistan that is certain to play a central role in his presidency, a conflict whose cost in blood and money is escalating even as many Afghans speak of a growing sense of peril in their daily lives.
Seven years on, Western military commanders are saying aloud what most were unwilling to acknowledge publicly even a few months ago: that they are struggling as never before to find a winning strategy against an insurgency that has amply proved its determination and durability.
Coalition troops, who now include more than 30,000 Americans, with more slated to arrive in coming months, are dying in greater numbers in 2008 than in any year since the start of the war in 2001. So are Afghan civilians, who are almost always the principal victims of suicide bombings and other attacks aimed at Western troops and Afghan government installations.
Security is fast deteriorating in many parts of the country, particularly in Kabul, the capital, where brazen killings and abductions are on the rise. Insurgents regularly manage to foil heavy security and carry out attacks, such as last week's suicide bombing at the Ministry of Information and Culture in the center of the city.
The Taliban and allied militant groups, left scattered and broken by the American-led invasion seven years ago that drove them from power, have roared back to life over the last two years, sowing violence on a scale not seen since the austerely fundamentalist Islamic movement shocked the world with the medieval cruelty of its rule over Afghanistan.
"When you hear about things like innocent people being beheaded for no reason, you just shiver. Your mind takes you back to Taliban times," said Mahmood Parwani, a shopkeeper. "I don't believe those times will come again, but for certain, we are not where we had hoped to be by now, as a country."
Afghans followed the American presidential race with a great deal of interest. In a country with one of the world's highest illiteracy rates, relatively few people interviewed could identify both candidates by name, usually referring to "the young one" and "the old one" -- or to Barack Obama, who is much better known here, and "that other one." But many Afghans knew that both John McCain and Obama had called for an increased number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan -- a notion that is generally applauded, despite anger over the record number of accidental civilian deaths so far this year at the hands of coalition forces.
