Both the French military and the Italian government deny the report, but surely this won’t make those NATO meetings very pleasant. There was already discord among the NATO countries regarding duty in Afghanistan–we saw it firsthand in 2005, when the situation was relatively good–and although not necessarily related to the Times report, French president Nicholas Sarkozy is refusing to increase the Gallic contingent.

Great Britain, however, is–500 additional soldiers to its approximately 8,300. And Bob Shepherd, a SAS veteran and security contractor who has traveled through most of Afghanistan between 2004-2009, believes this is flawed.

So the Italians were here, the French were here--let's go there....

“You could put 40,000 in Helmund alone and it won’t make a difference,” he said. “It’s just going to mean more deaths to soldiers and more money, and right now we can’t afford it. Britain is about to implode–I don’t know how you (in the U.S.) are doing, but we can’t afford to be there.”

As for the potential to pay off the Taliban, Shepherd points out that “Mullah Omar and his people won’t negotiate with the U.S. and coalition forces, but the people below him will, as long as they get paid something. Forget a surge (like in Iraq)–you have to pay money and a lot, but the question is, how are you going to get it together, and how long are you going to do it? We’re all in tough, tough times right now.”

“We are a sideshow,” she reiterated recently.

Bob Shepherd, a former SAS soldier and author of The Circuit who spent most of 2004-2008 in Afghanistan, agrees. “There are all sorts of proxy battles, between Afghans, between countries, that make the country a huge jigsaw puzzle,” he told us.

It’s increasingly apparent the U.S. and its allies are in way over their heads, and Shepherd thinks the reasons for the war are becoming dangerously murky.

“This is the fourth Afghan war for (the British),” Shepherd said, “and we’re four-nil. Why are we still there? I haven’t heard one peep about bin Laden. I do not understand why we are there, when it is blatantly obvious to a blind man that we’re losing.”

As a private security contractor for journalists and dignitaries, Shepherd logged time in many of the areas now off-limits, such as Helmund and Paktia provinces, and observed, “I was out there almost continuously, and my movements got restricted every year. Where I could go in 2004, I couldn’t go in 2005; where I could go in 2005, I couldn’t go in 2006. In 2009, I couldn’t go outside of Kabul. People were doing it, but they were getting abducted and getting killed. I would not today take the drive from Kabul to Jalabad.

“I’d put the mortgage on my house that Afghanistan will implode.”

The question the U.S. military leaders have been asked to answer is: Can we win, and what does a ‘win’ mean?

“Right now, (the Afghan people are) jumping to the Taliban,” Shepherd said. “They are looking after themselves, and they’ll do anything to make that work. If we pay them more than the Taliban does, then they’ll jump to us. But how much is that going to cost? And how long are we going to have to pay for it?”

In our next Afghan update: How, indeed?

Good old-fashioned team work

One mutual interest in the region: a stabilized Afghanistan.  We spoke with our favorite Afghanistan expert, and Council on Foreign Relations connection, Elizabeth Rubin.  She explained how we are not going to fix Afghanistan without the help of a former ally in the region.  So we’ll have to fix that relationship before they will help us.  And they are not going to make it easy.

Our favorite Afghanistan expert, Council On Foreign Relations’s Elizabeth Rubin, talked with Film at 11  about the proxy war that these soldiers are going to be joining in on.

In this excerpt, she breaks down who The Taliban are, who they were when we first started fighting them, and who they are turning into, and who they are not.

These photographs were taken by our Director of Photography, Nelson Villarreal, in Kabul:

Anti-Narcotic Afghan troops trained by Blackwater.

Even in the nicest neighborhood in Kabul, there are remnants of the last war (with the Soviets, for those keeping count).

A housing shortage due to influx of refugees from the countryside and high rent due to influx of ex-pats has driven many Afghan families into tents.