Aunohita Mojumdar: Taliban winning the war of words. Even before 9/11/2001 the Taliban's reputation in the world wasn't much better than cannibals. So the notion that now they've become more credible than the Karzai government and its NATO backers and Blackwater helpers is mind-bending. Flunking Redevelopment 101 should have been expected; blowing Counterinsurgency 201 may have been in the cards as well. But the one thing the US brought to the party that was truly world class was the PR machine. If the US can't win there, things are really in sad shape. Just how the US adventure in Afghanistan managed to go so badly is something that will be much studied in the future.

The power of the militants' propaganda is evident from a new report published by the Brussels-based independent International Crisis Group (ICG) this week. The report, "Taliban Propaganda: Winning the War of Words", argues that the Taliban are "successfully tapping into the strains of Afghan nationalism and exploiting policy failures by the Kabul government and its international backers". The result, it says, "is weakening public support for nation-building, even though few actively support the Taliban".

There is a lot more stuff on Afghanistan, most of it damning, little hopeful in any sense. This just struck me as a tipping point, given that the one thing the Taliban has never been known for is their mastery of the arcane arts of PR. But then this may not be Mullah Omar's Taliban any more. They engage in tactics that the old Taliban never touched, and they've clearly learned a few tricks from the resistance in Iraq. For a long time lots of people liked to blame Pakistan for the resurgent Taliban -- a posture Bush couldn't really indulge in because even he realized that there were limits to how much the US could piss on Musharaf.

I've been thumbing through Michael Kinsley's Please Don't Remain Calm, and I came across a piece of his dated Feb. 28, 2002 (about a year before the Iraq war started) where he plainly stated, "We avoided a quagmire in Afghanistan." Clearly, he was wrong about that. Interestingly, he was still wrong even though the US didn't make a lot of the mistakes Bush made in Iraq -- e.g., he went in with substantial local support, he lined up quite a bit of international support, he didn't try to mold Afghanistan into a wet dream state of the GOP think tanks, he didn't have to fend off suspicions that he was only in it for the oil (indeed, he wasn't in it for much of anything) -- and still they screwed it up coming and going. I remember thinking when this started that Afghanistan was going to be the death of a third world empire. That prediction still seems to be pretty much on track.