Al Jazeera has uncovered evidence that Taliban fighters are now in effective control of large parts of a key province in southwest Afghanistan, despite recent claims by Nato that their bases had been destroyed.
James Bays spent two days with the Taliban in Helmand and found that the group is running schools and medical facilities, and is travelling armed and unchallenged by Nato-led forces
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Uh-oh. This isn't the story we've been told in Western media. Some will call this story propaganda; the fact is that the best propaganda is truth. To a certain extent Western journalists -- like the military -- hold the major towns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Information from the front lines, or behind those ever-shifting lines, is more difficult for Western reporters to dig out. An al-Jazeera reporter can move where a Western journalist cannot. If the Taliban and al-Qaeda have what is effectively their own Green Zone in Afghanistan, NATO and Americans are in far more trouble than Washington admits. If a pullback in Iraq is considered problematic by the administration, the existence of an Afghan "homeland" for the insurgents in an area we had cleared once is a major defeat.
