The real enemy in Afghanistan is reactionary leadership represented by corrupt politicians, ruthless warlords and the twisted religious extremism of the Taliban.

A recently released U.N. report states that 1,271 Afghans died and 1,997 were injured in the first six months of this year. Three-quarters of these casualties were caused by Taliban forces, mostly from roadside bombings.

Each day between 25 and 50 Afghan civilians, Afghan, coalition and American soldiers are wounded or killed by the Taliban.

If the battle of Barg-e-Matal ever goes down in history, I am not sure if it will be treated as a victory or a defeat or a tragedy or a comedy.

Former CIA Director Richard Helms counseled that when dealing with societies in and around the Middle East, pay attention to the things that are hundreds of years old -- the religious sects, the clans, the tribes.

Will the epitaph of the war in Afghanistan be motion without progress and knowledge without wisdom?

I have been in-country about one week, enough time for some initial impressions.

It may be an Apollo 13 moment in Afghanistan.

I am at the Continental Replacement Center at Fort Benning, Ga. It is the mission of the CRC to prepare soldiers for deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and other locations abroad.

Military personnel sent to fight a war shouldn't have to wonder if the U.S. Constitution they swear an oath to defend is being systematically undermined at home or fear that they might be politically abandoned on the field of battle.

In the weeks following the airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States was subjected to a biological weapons attack. The investigation into that event has been under question almost since the beginning and certainly since the field of suspects was narrowed.

In a recent commentary, "Afghanistan and Obama Transparency, Credibility and a Long War," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that both the current and the previous administrations failed to address the war effort's most critical aspect of strategic communications.

In the last few weeks, we have witnessed quite a spectacle concerning the question of whether homosexuals may be permitted to serve openly in the military.

The sorry state of affairs surrounding the training and readiness of the Afghan National Police is again in the news. If it were not so pathetic it would be laughable.

U.S. troops won the battle but the Waygal valley and its surrounding areas remain the Wild West.

Outside View: To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it is very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.

According to a strategic assessment of security operations in Afghanistan prepared by U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey (Ret.) on Dec 9, 2009, the Taliban believe they are winning.

The U.S. military recently announced that the elders of the Shinwari tribe, which comprises 600,000 people in Nangarhar province and spans the Afghan-Pakistan border, signed an agreement to keep the Taliban out of their area.

U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is suspected to have pulled the trigger, but it was the pervasive indifference and endemic political correctness of the Army's bureaucracy that loaded the weapons.

"Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy." So states U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the deputy chief of staff, intelligence for the International Security Assistance Force, who is the highest-ranking intelligence officer in Afghanistan.

Despair Inc. offers lithographs that are parodies of inspiration posters. One is called "Incompetence," defined as "when you earnestly believe you can compensate for a lack of skill by doubling your efforts, there's no end to what you can't do."

The National Guard is part of the military reserve forces and operates under the authority of the governor or adjutant general of each of the 50 U.S. states and may offer an idea for security forces in Afghanistan.

A CBS news report filed by Kimberly Dozier states that U.S. Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met in Kandahar with five Afghan tribal elders. Pulling out his notebook, the admiral asked the Afghans what they need. Apparently the new fashionable counterinsurgency introductory question is "What do you need?" rather than "Are you fighting on our side?" or "Are we winning?"

The Obama administration's decision to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in 18 months after the start of the surge has already begun to bear fruit, but perhaps not in a way that was intended.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal said: "To pursue our core goal of defeating al-Qaida and preventing their return to Afghanistan, we must disrupt and degrade the Taliban's capacity, deny their access to the Afghan population, and strengthen the Afghan security forces."