Warnings of NATO's impending collapse

The US and its allies are not only losing the war in Afghanistan, but their military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), is also on the verge of unravelling as a result of this failure. Several Western officials, including US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, defence secretary Robert Gates, British foreign secretary David Miliband and Lord Paddy Ashdown, a British peer, have in recent days given dire warnings about NATO's impending collapse. Some of this is clearly hyperbole from worried US officials who are unable to fight alone an ill-conceived war launched in a fit of temper, hoping to persuade their reluctant allies to commit more troops to Afghanistan, but there is unmistakable truth in their assertions about a disaster-in-the-making. The Taliban have regrouped and, thanks to the US's indiscriminate bombing of villages, entire tribes in the south and southwest of the country have joined the resistance. Unlike the past, this year resistance activities have continued despite an unusually harsh winter. It has been so cold that several hundred (perhaps a thousand) Afghans have frozen to death.

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