The Taliban has retaken control of about 10 percent of Afghanistan's territory, less than seven years after being run out of the country by US military forces, intelligence officials told Congress on Wednesday.
"The Taliban was able to control ... in the area about 10 to 11 percent of the country," Mike McConnell, US Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said in testimony before the Senate's Armed Services Committee. The US-backed Hamid Karzai government meanwhile, controls just "30/31 percent, and then the rest of it was under the local control," McConnell told lawmakers.
Another top intelligence official, General Michael Maples, Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency told lawmakers that the gains can be attributed in part to aid from the al Qaeda international terror network.
"We believe that al Qaeda has expanded its support to the Afghan insurgency," Maples said at the hearing. Afghanistan has in the last year seen its most violent period since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, increasing pressure on the United States and its allies in Nato to beef up their military contingents to avoid the country falling again to the radical Islamists.
"At the same time, al Qaeda presents an increased threat to Pakistan, while it continues to plan, support and direct transnational attacks from its de facto safe haven in Pakistan's largely ungoverned frontier provinces," Maples told the Senators at the hearing.