Six years after being ousted in the US-led invasion, the Taleban have retaken about 10% of Afghanistan, US intelligence chief Mike McConnell says.
The government controlled just 30% of the country, and the rest was under tribal control, the director of national intelligence told senators.
But that assertion has been denied by the Afghan government as incorrect.
The Committee on Armed Services heard the Taleban's resurgence was due partly to increased support from al-Qaeda.
The last 12 months have seen the worst violence in Afghanistan since 2001.
The head of the US Defence Intelligence Agency told the same committee major problems remained in trying to crack down on the lawless tribal area on Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.
Here's an excerpt of a Feb. 22 interview PBS's Bill Moyers conducted with Sarah Chayes, an American journalist and activist living in Kandahar: (h/t to 'Rolling Back The Tide ...')
BILL MOYERS: We've also given a lot of money to Pakistan, across the border.
SARAH CHAYES: Right. Correct.
BILL MOYERS: To help fight the insurgents, right? What's happening to that money?
SARAH CHAYES: Well, we're paying a billion dollars a year to Pakistan, which is orchestrating the Taliban insurgency. So, it's actually US-taxpayer money that is paying for the insurgents, who are then killing, at the moment, Canadian troops. Now if I were the government of Germany or France, I'd have a hard time putting my troops in that kind of equation. I would demand from Washington, that Washington require a lot different behavior from Pakistan.
BILL MOYERS: But the money's supposed to be to stop the Taliban in Afghanistan.
SARAH CHAYES: Has anybody done very strict accounting on where that money is going? I suspect that if you start looking at some of the receipts, you'll find that there's money missing. I mean, I find it really amazing that, for example, recently, there was a cross border raid, that killed an Al Qaeda commander named Al-Libi in Beluchistan province of Pakistan. Now, the entire Taliban top command, or at least the top command of the part that's operating in the south, is based on Beluchistan province. People know exactly where they are. Why has we never required those guys heads from Islamabad? Or why have we not considered taking them out ourselves? It's been very clear to me, watching since 2002, that Pakistan has been buying us off, by a well-timed delivery of an Al Qaeda operative, which has then caused us to look the other way about the Taliban.
BILL MOYERS: Isn't it because we were so concerned the government was so concerned with fighting the terrorist, that we made this alliance with Pakistan in order to try to find Osama bin Laden, and to prevent the spread of terrorism.
SARAH CHAYES: Correct. And we made an alliance with these thugs than we then placed into positions of power. It's like a western movie. You know, you've got a posse. You're going go out after the outlaws, so you gather together a posse and it's usually a posse of criminals, right? But in a western movie, you don't then put the posse on the city council. You know.
BILL MOYERS: So who is the sheriff?
SARAH CHAYES: We're the sheriff.
BILL MOYERS: We are?
SARAH CHAYES: In this particular metaphor, we're the sheriff, right? We're going go out after the outlaw, Osama bin Laden. We gather this posse of Afghan criminals to gallop off with us. And then we put them in positions of the governor. We make them into the governor, the mayor, the, you know. And we don't ask them anything about how they're governing. We don't demand-- all we say is, we have to support the Afghan government. We have to support the Afghan government. And so we've fed them money, we've fed them arms, and then we say to the people, "okay, you're supposed to hold your government accountable." They're looking at these thugs with the whole power of the entire world, is what it looks like to them, behind them. And the Afghan people say, "you want us to hold them accountable?" So this, I think, is really the root of the problem.
BILL MOYERS: Why is the southern part of Afghanistan so important to us?
SARAH CHAYES: It's kind of like the marrow of the country's bones. Afghanistan was founded in Kandahar. Later the capital was moved to Kabul. Kandahar was really the capital, the Taliban's capital. It's also the part of the country that the Pakistani government has been able to control most successfully by proxy. So, this is why 99 percent of the people in Kandahar believe that we are allied with the Taliban. Everybody thinks that America is allied with the Taliban.
BILL MOYERS: Because we're supporting Pakistan?
SARAH CHAYES: That's right. That's right.
BILL MOYERS: So what's our bind in southern Afghanistan?
SARAH CHAYES: I think there are two binds. One is our relationship with Pakistan, which is a contradictory one. And the other is our unwillingness to hold Afghan public officials to any standard of decency in government. We keep hearing in the west, about the democratically-elected Afghan government. And, oh, no, we can't get in there and interfere with any of these people, because they're the government of a sovereign country.
Well, you could have fooled the Afghans. The Afghans-- the only person who's really elected, who has any power, is president Karzai. But every other government official that Afghans interact with on a daily basis, they didn't elect. And they don't have any recourse. They've got no way of lodging a complaint against this person. Or nobody who can put any leverage on them. And that's the other bind. We're only fooling ourselves when we talk about this democratically-elected Afghan government.