A US Military Intelligence Report, known as the “State of the Taliban 2012”, was leaked to the BBC and The Times recently. This report shows that the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, is set to take control of Afghanistan after the withdrawal of US and NATO forces. That’s pretty damn scary.

The report concludes that the Taliban’s strength and morale are largely intact in spite of Nato efforts to the contrary. The report also shows that significant numbers of Afghan government soldiers are defecting to the Taliban, which is in stark contrast to what NATO has been telling us all along – that things are just dandy.

The report also indicates that the Taliban is firmly under the thumb of the Pakistani secret service, but that they’re not happy about this at all. This claim has been officially rejected by the Pakistani government.

The report is the latest of a series aimed at providing an assessment of the insurgency on the basis of detainee interrogations, mostly at the Nato base at Bagram. The first, the State of the Taliban 2009, was drawn up by US academics attached to a special forces unit called Task Force 373, charged with hunting down Taliban commanders. That report was influential in convincing the British government at the time that a peace deal could be done with the Taliban.

[Source: Guardian]