Afghanistan’s Kunduz province had been earlier evaluated as secure that is why troops were moved to other hotspots. Now, with US and Afghan forces concentrated on the southern regions of Afghanistan, the Taliban have returned to the northern Kunduz province. In fact, ‘the Taliban is now threatening a key route bringing NATO supplies from Central Asia.’

The Taliban is said to have arrived with “lots of cash, new dollars and guns,” ‘began collecting ushr, an Islamic tax, from farmers, and demanding the residents to prepare guns and men to do jihad.

What is worse is that the troop surge that US President Barack Obama has just ordered deployed to Afghanistan will not boost troops in Kunduz. The province will have the same troop level. ‘Relatively few additional troops are expected in the north; most will be directed to the heartland of the Taliban resistance in the south and east.’

Kunduz is ‘far from the heartland of the Taliban insurgency in the south. This once peaceful northern province was one place American and Afghan officials thought they did not have to worry about.’ A resurgence of Taliban presence is proof that ‘security has broken down even in unexpected parts of Afghanistan.’

Also, the failure ‘’to remain vigilant to signs of Taliban encroachment’ and reducing ‘deployments in the northern provinces in order to bolster other, more volatile regions’ are demonstrations of how fundamentally clueless foreign forces are as far as the general aim of ending the Afghan insurgency is concerned.

Via The New York Times