The Good News: "The War on Terror is Over".The Bad News: "Congressional leaders say Taliban is stronger now".

The Good News: "The War on Terror is Over".The Bad News: "Congressional leaders say Taliban is stronger now".(WT).The heads of the House and Senate intelligence committees on Sunday declared that the Taliban has grown stronger since President Obama’s deployment of 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in 2010. The pessimistic report by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, and Rep. Mike Rogers, Michigan Republican, challenges Mr. Obama’s own assessment last week in his surprise visit to Kabul that the “tide had turned” and that “we broke the Taliban‘s momentum.” In a joint interview, Mrs. Feinstein and Mr. Rogers told CNN’s “State of the Union” they aren’t so sure. The two recently returned from a fact-finding trip to the region, where they met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. “President Karzai believes that the Taliban will not come back. I’m not so sure,” Mrs. Feinstein said. “The Taliban has a shadow system of governors in many provinces.” When asked if she agreed with the administration’s assertion that theTaliban‘s capabilities have been degraded since Obama’s “surge” in U.S. troops, Mrs. Feinstein said, “I think we’d both say that what we’ve found is that the Taliban is stronger.” ... Mr. Rogers added that he and Mrs. Feinstein agree that the first step should be for the United States to designate the Haqqani group a terrorist network and “take aggressive steps” to disrupt their operations.
Mr. Rogers said the group is responsible for nearly 500 U.S. deaths and continues to operate outposts along the Afghan-Pakistani border.... It is not clear to me why we have not designated the Haqqani as a terrorist organization. They are certainly an enemy force and they should be treated as such. Pakistan has been making a bogus claim of sovereignty over the area where their sanctuary is, but it clearly has not been exercising sovereignty over the Haqqani. Obama made a mistake by not providing enough surge forces for us to deal with Eastern Afghanistan. This allowed the Taliban to reassert themselves there and use it as a base of operations for extending control into other areas. Their attacks on Kabul generally are launched from that area.We have had some success at killing leadership targets, but Karzai is a hindrance to that effort with his complaints about night raids. I think the Taliban treachery campaign has had more success in this country in cutting support for operations in Afghanistan. Obama has not demonstrated the kind of leadership needed to get political support for his strategy.Hmmm.......Secret U.S. program releases high-level Taliban insurgents in exchange for pledges of peace.Read the full story here.