The US is only half way towards reaching its goals in Afghanistan, a retired US army general has said.
Gen Stanley McChrystal, who commanded US forces and their Nato allies in 2009-10, said that even after a decade, the US still lacks the knowledge to bring the conflict to a successful end.
He argued that the US entered Afghanistan with too little knowledge of Afghan culture. “We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough,” he said.
Gen McChrystal's comments come a decade since the US and UK launched the campaign known as Operation Enduring Freedom in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks.
According to a UN report published last week, Afghanistan has become more insecure in 2011, with a sharp rise in security incidents and higher numbers of civilian casualties.
The number of security incidents recorded during the first eight months of the year was nearly 40 per cent higher than in the same period of 2010.
While about two-thirds of the violence was concentrated in the south and southeast, suicide attacks became more common outside that area, with the central region accounting for one in five.
The number of complex suicide attacks has jumped by half in the year to date from a year earlier, and made up a greater proportion of all suicide attacks.
Civilian casualties, already at record levels for the first half of the year, rose 5 per cent in the June-August period compared with last year, with insurgents linked to three quarters of those deaths and injuries.
The report to the UN Security Council by secretary-general Ban Ki-moon highlights the challenges facing Afghanistan's troubled government and the Nato-led coalition, which started its gradual handover of security responsibility to Afghan police and the army in July.
It said transition areas, which included Bamiyan and Panjshir provinces and southern Lashkar Gah city "continue to face a resilient insurgency that is attempting to challenge the capacity of the Afghan forces."
A total of 1,841 civilian deaths and injuries were recorded from June to August, of which 282, or 12 per cent, were attributed to Afghan or foreign forces.
Air strikes were the leading cause of deaths by coalition forces, killing 38 civilians in July, the highest number recorded for any month since February 2010, the report said.
The overall rise in civilian casualties was attributed to increased use by insurgents of home-made bombs and suicide attacks, which accounted for 45 per cent of deaths and injuries.
The use of such devices in attacks across Afghanistan had nearly doubled compared with the June-August period last year.
Higher levels of insecurity were accompanied by a rise in the number of internal refugees, with around 130,000 people abandoning their homes in the first seven months of the year, up nearly two-thirds from the same period a year earlier.
The UN assessment of humanitarian needs suggested as many as 1.3 million Afghans may require food aid in the next 10 months as a result of the conflict and "drought-like conditions" after a year with low rainfall.
It also noted a 65 per cent increase in eradication of opium poppy fields in 2011 from a year earlier, though it said the attacks on eradication teams had sharply increased, with 48 such incidents this year compared with 12 in 2012.
Over 10,000 Afghan civilians have died due to the fighting in the past five years alone and many more have been displaced.
More than 2,500 international troops have been killed, the majority of whom are American. The number of US troops killed in Afghanistan has jumped dramatically since 2009. As of October 4th, there were 1,682 deaths.
Since the war began, more than 2.3 million troops have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, as of the end of July, according to military statistics. Of those, more than 977,000 have served more than one tour and about 300,000 have been deployed more than twice.