(Afghanistan/Pakistan) 

It took the Soviets 10 years and the loss of 15,000 troops before they admitted they admitted defeat in Afghanistan. For the West, it will not take so long for the slow bleed to become a hemorrhage. It will be only a matter of one or two years, at the most before, Afghanistan falls and the country collapses again into fragmentation and internal civil war. It may indeed come sooner.

The Soviets were prepared to fight to the death in Afghanistan because they knew the edge of their empire was crumbling and a domino effect on its other republics would follow. The Soviet bureaucracy was fighting for its life. In Cold War terms it would have been the equivalent of the U.S. losing Mexico to communism. The U.S. and NATO forces don't have anything like the same motivation, determination and commitment to fight to the end in Afghanistan.

The nature of the catastrophe and abysmal defeat in Iraq fundamentally undermines the psychological foundations of any successful defence of the Kabul regime. The failure of new "surge" will embolden the Taliban and undermine confidence in the West among the Afghan people and among the warlord Mujahedin, who dominate its government. Collapse in Iraq will intensify the sense of hopelessness and pointlessness among Western forces and hasten demoralization and defeat.

They are low on adequate resources and relegated in importance. The former British Commander of NATO forces admitted that last year they came close to losing Kandahar, the second city. It is not ruled out that much of the south and east could fall into Taliban hands this year, paving the way for the fall of Kabul, the year after.

The Taliban are ferocious fighters, with a messianic fervour to fight to the death. They bring with them the experience of veterans of the brutal Soviet war and the civil war which followed. Now regrouped and rearmed, their forces are prepared for unfavourable open combat of almost suicidal proportions. Furthermore they are opportunistically changing tactics, both in order to create maximum urban destabilization and to win local support in the countryside. Boasting of more than 1,000 suicide volunteer bombers, they have also renounced their former policy against heroin cultivation, thus allowing them to win support among the rural population and gain support from local tribes, warlords and criminal gangs, who have been alienated by NATO policies of poppy field destruction.

Although disliked and despised in many quarters, the Taliban could not advance without the support or acquiescence of parts of the population, especially in the south. In particular, the Taliban is drawing on backing from the Pashtun tribes from whom they originate. The southern and eastern areas have been totally out of government control since 2001. Moreover, not only have they not benefited at all from the Allied occupation, but it is increasingly clear that with a few small centres of exception, all of the country outside Kabul has seen little improvement in its circumstances. The conditions for unrest are ripe and the Taliban is filling the vacuum.