Afghanistan - Only Getting Worse - Top US General

America's top uniform, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen didn't pull any punches when he sat down to a breakfast with reporters this morning. He warned them that conditions will likely worsen in Afghanistan next year. Mullen said that the Afghan situation has been headed in the wrong direction for the past two years. From McClatchey Newspapers:

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the security situation in Afghanistan cannot improve until there's economic and political development in Afghanistan and the U.S. and its coalition partners have embraced a strategy that links Afghan and Pakistani issues.
"The trends across the board are not going in the right direction," Mullen said at a breakfast with reporters this morning. "It will be tougher next year unless we get at all these challenges."

So, just why did we let things go to hell in a handbasket these past two years? What was that all about? Oh yeah, it's that "economy of force" thing, a means of describing the American military approach to Afghanistan which translates into committing a minimal number of troops.

General David Petraeus himself has described counterinsurgency warfare, the very type we're waging in Afghanistan, is the most labour-intensive of all. He's said that you have to throw huge numbers of troops into it for a long period of time - or you lose. He's written that you have to tackle this sort of war aggressively and get the job done fast because, if you don't, you lose the support of the locals and that means you lose the war.

If you read the American military's new counterinsurgency manual, prepared under the direction of Petraeus himself, you'll find that it details the "do's and don't's" of counterinsurgency warfare and that, for the past seven years, we've been on the wrong side of the do's and the don'ts. We've made every error in the book and yet we still seem puzzled that the Taliban is resurgent?

But wait, there's more! NATO, already unable to contain the Taliban, has decided to attack the opium trade but - get this - only the operations that support the Taliban.