The situation in Afghanistan is liable to get worse next year, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff warned on Thursday, amid reports of a bleak draft US intelligence assessment that details a slide into corruption, drugs and insurgent violence.
“The trends across the board are not going in the right direction,” Admiral Michael Mullen told reporters at a breakfast in Washington. “It will be tougher next year unless we get at all these challenges.”
The New York Times said the draft National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) casts doubts on the ability of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to stem the resurgence of the Taliban militia.
A spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence would not acknowledge the existence of such an NIE, while a US intelligence official told Agence France-Presse the assessment process was still in its early stages and “its conclusions are premature.”
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she expected to be briefed soon on the classified assessment, which represents the consensus view of 16 US intelligence agencies.
“I would just cite that Afghanistan is a difficult place,” Rice said. “It has made progress since 2001. We have all talked about new circumstances that have arisen there, and we are doing a review to see what more we can do.”
A US military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the downbeat “tone and direction” was not unexpected.
The White House has already launched an urgent strategy review led by Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, a deputy national security adviser and coordinator of the US war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For her part, Rice said the State Department is reviewing its operations, including those involving the Provincial Reconstruction Teams where civilian experts travel with military protection to remote parts of the country.
“We are looking also at what we can do to be more supportive of the ministries that president Karzai has put up,” she said.
General David McKiernan, the top US commander in Afghanistan, has asked for four more combat brigades and support forces — as many as 20,000 additional US troops — to beef up the 33,000-strong US force battling an intensifying insurgency.
But so far, the administration has promised only one combat brigade by February.
Military commanders have already warned that a political solution is needed in Afghanistan, but that corruption and a flourishing narcotics trade are undermining public support for the central government.
The draft NIE says a breakdown in central authority in Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the Karzai government and by increasingly sophisticated insurgent attacks from safe havens in Pakistan, the New York Times said.
The Washington Post said the that NIE describes a Pakistan-based extremist network with three elements — Pakistani extremists allied with Kashmiri militants; Afghan Taliban; and traditional tribal groups in western Pakistan that assist the other groups.
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