More Taliban attacks in northern Afghanistan. The south gets the attention and the resources, the north and west deteriorate, and the east — the area most centrally important to the stated al-Qaeda-centric objectives of the war — is in a state of drift, as best I can tell.

Here it is, to be laid out by the latest National Intelligence Estimates: no real partner in the corrupt central government, lagging development and security training, no buy-in from Pakistan to root out safe havens, fading support from the public, and a country still under Taliban control, for the most part.

Other than that, great war we’re running.

The next WikiLeaks dump is about to reveal to the world what the United States really thinks of the world leaders it pretends to like and the degree to which it overlooks corruption among friends (it sounds like the reports will include confirmation that Hamid Karzai is corrupt, among other things).

Knowing that it’s coming adds just a bit of irony to the publication of excerpts from a German document liberated to refute some claims Bush made in his memoir.

Among other things, the document describes the Germans warning the US–in February 2003–of just how badly the Iraq war would turn out.

At the same time that the US and NATO are explicitly setting the end date in Afghanistan later and later into the decade, a new poll from Quinnipiac shows that public support for the war has completely collapsed. A majority of Americans now opposed continued involvement in Afghanistan. The ideological lines on this issue are interesting. . . .

Earlier this year, while Stanley McChrystal still headed US forces in Afghanistan, McChrystal lost control of messaging and stories began to come out revealing the extent to which Special Operations Forces night raids were alienating Afghan civilians. One of the more telling reports was by Anand Gopal, where he described in detail the anguish of families who lose members to these intrusions into family compounds, with loved ones disappearing into a secret prison system. Shortly after that report, we had the disgusting revelation of Special Operations Forces carving their bullets out of the dead bodies of women they killed in a botched raid on a family compound. Somehow, even though the number of these night raids has increased dramatically since David Petraeus has taken over after McChrystal was fired, stories detailing the horrors of night raids and the deaths and destruction caused to families who are incorrectly targeted have not appeared as frequently as they did in the spring. This weekend, the silence on night raids was broken by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and that action sent David Petraeus into a toddler-level pout.

Details are beginning to emerge in the death of an Afghan prisoner on Sunday night. According to ISAF, a US soldier is in custody and a criminal investigation is underway. Hamid Karzai issued a short statement calling the death a killing by coalition forces. The New York Times recounts that one version of the story suggests the prisoner may have been trying to escape, but other Afghans who were present at the prison disagree on that point.

Bob Woodward’s inside-the-White-House books always provide scoops and provoke controversy and his new one, Obama’s Wars, is no different, but with one vital twist: It is less a look back than a look around. Readers don’t merely re-live or debate, say, a president’s decision to start a war – nothing much can change that – but how he is now conducting, even escalating, a conflict at a key moment. The book concludes with an Oval Office interview with President Obama less than three months ago.

The most depressing part of this McClatchy article on the corrupt USAID contracting in Afghanistan by the construction company, Louis Berger, are six-year old quotes calling for an alternative to Berger. Either we’ve become a banana republic sooner than most people realized (perhaps with the FL county in 2000? Or before that?). Or all those attempts to blame Afghan culture for the corruption there are just lame excuses invented to help us overlook our own apparently intractable tolerance for corruption.

The topline US reports on the Afghan parliamentary elections will strike a narrative flourish about ordinary citizens braving bomb threats and rocket attacks to reach the polls and perform their civic duty. You can bet that will be mirrored in the President’s statement on the elections later today. Remember the purple fingers?

Sometimes you need a Rosetta Stone to translate the New York Times when it tries to unravel the moral muddle of the Obama Administration’s Afghanistan policy. Today’s example shows the Times hopelessly mired in doublespeak from the very first paragraph.