How Are Things Going in Afghanistan?

A Pentagon report says: not well.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, May 14, 2010, at 4:17 PM ET

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Hamid Karzai has gone back to Afghanistan, and so the denizens of the Pentagon's E Ring and Foggy Bottom's seventh floor can drop their strained smiles and resume biting away at their fingernails.

Things in that unhappy country are going badly—much worse, of course, than Team Obama had to pretend this week but quite a bit worse than even a sensible skeptic might think. And unless Karzai takes to heart the lectures he heard (someone must have given him a stern talking-to amid all the bonhomie), things are only going to get worse still.

The evidence for this comes from an unclassified, 150-page Defense Department document called "Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan." Released in late April, it's the fifth in a series of semi-annual reports mandated by Congress. A few disheartening lines from its executive summary were duly recited by the media. But the full report is a hair-raiser. The news is almost all bad; and the few bits of good news turn out, on close inspection, to be extremely misleading.