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Afghanistan: Going backwards

Afghanistan was supposed to be the model, at least of sorts, for what the allies could do in a country under attack from the Taliban and far too much opium growing.

As events have turned out the Taliban is stronger than ever, the war lords in various regions still have more than considerable power and opium-growing is in record numbers. To that add an ever-increasing toll of innocent civilians and a President, and government of sorts, losing any grip on whatever power they had. All in all a disaster - as the LA Times reports - and hardly something which augers well for the future of the country, or for that matter, in the pr battle being waged to show the world what the West can do in both introducing democracy to a country and bettering the lives of its people.

"After more than five years of increasingly intense warfare, the conflict in Afghanistan reached a grim milestone in the first half of this year: U.S. troops and their NATO allies killed more civilians than insurgents did, according to several independent tallies.

The upsurge in deaths at the hands of Western forces has been driven by Taliban tactics as well as by actions of the American military and its allies.

But the growing toll is causing widespread disillusionment among the Afghan people, eroding support for the government of President Hamid Karzai and exacerbating political rifts among NATO allies about the nature and goals of the mission in Afghanistan.

More than 500 Afghan civilians have been reported killed this year, and the rate has dramatically increased in the last month.

In some instances, it was difficult to determine whether the dead were combatants or noncombatants. But in many other cases, there was no doubt that the person killed was a bystander to war."

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