With new figures showing that civilian deaths are now at their highest levels since U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban seven years ago, and with corruption and mismanagement hampering the international reconstruction effort, there has been an awful lot of bad news coming out of Afghanistan of late.
Even as U.S. President Barak Obama readies to send 17,000 more troops into the country, commentators are predicting a rocky road ahead as the situation in Afghanistan looks set to unravel even further.
"A grim picture of spiralling violence and a disintegrating society," is how Britain's Independent newspaper paints the situation in Afghanistan.
The newspaper refers to a recent NATO report which shows across the board, increases in attacks on the Afghan government, kidnappings and assassinations, fatalities among Western forces, and civilian deaths (which were up by 46 percent on 2008 compared with the previous year).
"The security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated markedly in the past six months. A majority of provinces have slipped out of Kabul's control; foreign troops have become the enemy, and the Taliban have infiltrated ever closer to Kabul," an editorial in The Independent says of the latest decline in the country's stability.
"Like the Soviet empire (and the British one before it), the U.S. has failed to understand that controlling Afghanistan is much harder than invading it," the Economist says, adding that the U.S. now looks set to repeat the same errors made by the Soviet Union in the country.
Obama's decision to send more American troops to Afghanistan actually shows how badly things are going, reflected in an editorial in the magazine.
"The war in Afghanistan will be won, if at all, by means of more troops on the ground (to reduce the dependence on air power and the civilian casualties it brings); through huge investment in development; and through piecemeal arrangements with local tribes and powerbrokers, including the Taliban," the Economist continues.
More troops, however, aren't seen by all as essential to solving the country's problems.
"The additional 17,000 troops the Obama administration is preparing to send to Afghanistan will face both an aggressive, well-armed Taliban insurgency and an unarmed but equally daunting foe: public opinion," says the Washington Post.
"In more than a dozen interviews across the capital this week, Afghans said that instead of helping to defeat the insurgents and quell the violence that has engulfed their country, more foreign troops will exacerbate the problem," says The Post.
"The growing negative perception of foreign forces is especially worrisome because U.S. military planners say they are counting on intensified interaction and co-operation with Afghan civilians as a vital complement to their expanded use of ground troops and firepower against the Islamist forces."
The Dallas News also found problems with the military methods being proposed.
"We're losing the war against the Taliban Â? The options aren't good; the way forward is murky," an editorial in the paper says.
"The U.S. must step up its efforts to help Afghan civilians by building schools, hospitals and other facilities to improve their lives," the editorial concludes.
But many disagree that the development efforts as they stand now offer a path to peace in the struggling country.
Corruption, incompetence, chronic mismanagement and profiteering are seriously hampering efforts to reconstruct the country, writes Britain's Guardian newspaper.
The Afghan government now says $5 billion, a third of all the international aid delivered, cannot be accounted for.
The reconstruction culture in Afghanistan is of lucrative contracts repeatedly sub-contracted till there are few funds left to complete the building of hospitals, schools or roads, and huge sums are wasted on expatriate consultants, the Guardian, which has a video on how some of the money has been wasted, shows.
With too many organisations registered as NGOs when they are nothing of the sort, and too little transparency and openness about who gets what projects, there are serious issues with the way that the aid system works in Afghanistan says Conor Foley, a humanitarian aid worker.
"Humanitarian aid has become a multi-billion dollar industry in recent years, and has outgrown the checks that are needed to regulate (it)," Foley points out.
The problems go beyond Afghanistan, he adds.
"(The U.N.) takes funds from donors and then distributes these to NGOs, who in turn hire local staff and contractors to actually get the work done. Everyone takes a cut along the way," Foley says.
"As the sums of money involved have grown ever bigger Â? and as an increasing amount of the aid has been used for overtly political purposes Â? the problem has grown more serious. Unless urgent action is taken, the humanitarian sector as a whole is going to have its image permanently tarnished by what is currently happening," the humanitarian aid worker writing for the Guardian concludes.
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