KABUL — Citing evidence that Taliban insurgents have expanded their reach across Afghanistan, aid groups and security analysts in the country are challenging as misleading the Obama administration’s recent claim that insurgents control less territory than they did a year ago.
“Absolutely, without any reservation, it is our opinion that the situation is a lot more insecure this year than it was last year,” said Nic Lee, the director of the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, an independent organization that analyzes security dangers for aid groups. “We don’t see COIN has had any impact on the five-year trajectory,” he said, referring to the counterinsurgency strategy that U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, has championed.
While U.S.-led forces have driven insurgents out of their strongholds in southern Afghanistan, Taliban advances in the rest of the country may have offset those gains, a cross-section of year-end estimates suggests.
Insurgent attacks have jumped at least 66 percent this year, according to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office. Security analysts say Taliban shadow governors still exert control in all but one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.
A recent United Nations security estimate of the risks that U.N. personnel face as they travel around Afghanistan concluded that security was deteriorating in growing areas across the country.
In one example, the U.N.’s World Food Program no longer sends its trucks along the road that links Kabul to Bamiyan, one of the country’s safest regions, because a bomb killed a U.N. contract driver and three police escorts on the route in July.
“Our ability to use these routes has decreased,” said Challiss McDonough, a Kabul- based spokeswoman for the international food program. “There are fewer places where we have completely unimpeded access.”
A 20 percent increase in civilian casualties in 2010 and the highest coalition death toll in nine years of war add to the belief in Afghanistan that insecurity is growing, not declining.
President Barack Obama offered the assessment of diminished Taliban control Dec. 3 during a surprise visit to the country.
“Today we can be proud that there are fewer areas under Taliban control, and more Afghans have a chance to build a more hopeful future,” Obama told U.S. troops at Bagram Airfield.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated the claim two weeks later in discussing the findings of a 40-page, still-secret assessment of U.S. progress in Afghanistan that was announced Dec. 16.
But last month, the Pentagon concluded that Afghan insurgents’ “capabilities and operational reach have been qualitatively and geographically expanding.”
Asked whether that assessment conflicts with the White House assertion that the Taliban controls less territory, a military spokesman said both could be true.
“You can, in fact, lose ground but be more geographically dispersed,” said U.S. Rear Adm. Greg Smith, the communications director for the American-led military in Afghanistan.
