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The meat of NBC's Afghanistan coverage consisted of a five-minute explainer by Richard Engel covering the course of the war since 2001. His narrative had Taliban guerrillas fleeing Afghanistan and regrouping in the tribal areas of Pakistan after the US invasion ousted its regime. "Around 2005, the Taliban returned to Afghanistan--because they could. Back then there were few US troops in Afghanistan. Many more were being deployed to Iraq and the Afghan army only had 35,000 men."
NBC's Engel estimates that the Taliban now has 25,000 guerrillas deployed across about 80% of Afghan territory. He showed us the squalid refugee camps on the outskirts of Kabul filling with peasants fleeing fighting in the south. "In the Afghan countryside, Taliban militants now openly patrol, subsidized by a robust opium trade, and although they are unpopular, few Afghans have been willing to fight the Taliban, afraid US forces might leave and they will be hunted down. Other Afghans choose not to fight the Taliban because the alternative is to support the Afghan government, which is widely seen as corrupt and ineffective."
Back at the Pentagon, CBS' David Martin perceived a potential "watershed" in Barack Obama's relationship with senior military leaders. Martin cited public statements by Chairman Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by a pair of generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. The trio insisted on a strategy of counterinsurgency in support of the Afghan government, requiring troop reinforcements. The White House believes the brass was "boxing the President in with their public statements," Martin reported.
The sheer logistics of a reinforcement mean that the Commander-in-Chief is under no immediate deadline to decide what to do, CBS' Martin pointed out. Even if he ordered 40,000 more troops into battle "it would be 2011 before they all got there." Building facilities to house the extra troops means that the maximum pace of deployment is one brigade per quarter. In Kabul, NBC's Engel agreed: "The military moves very, very slowly." By then, CBS' Martin added, counterinsurgency might be moot: "McChrystal has warned it could be lost in the next twelve months."
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