The administration’s balloon of denial can only take so much hot air before it pops.

In a brief interview after the speech, Burns said he was not saying there is no security threat in Afghanistan. But, he added, the Afghan government is stable.

“We don’t believe the Taleban represent a strategic threat in this sense: the government of Afghanistan is secure,” he said. “And there’s a problem of security in Afghanistan. It’s primarily in the east and in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Uruzgan and Helmand.

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Barnett Rubin, senior fellow of New York University’s Center for International Cooperation, says the Taleban may not pose a strategic threat in the conventional military sense. But Rubin, who was a U.N. advisor in the Afghan peace negotiations after the Taleban fell in 2001, says the Taleban is eating away at the Kabul government’s authority.

“The Taleban pose a very serious threat to the government of Afghanistan,” he said. “They do not pose a conventional military threat to NATO, the U.S.-led coalition, or the Afghan government, which is unfortunately what U.S. planners seem to have in mind when they make statements like ‘the Taleban do not pose a strategic threat.’ But the Taleban are very successfully undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government.” Article

The deadly and debilitating square dance of shifting control and suppression.

In Afghanistan officials said that the return of the Taleban to a town secured and then left by British troops was beyond dispute. “This is the first time in history that the Taleban were recognised as a political movement,” said Haji Dad Mohammed Khan, the former intelligence chief of Helmand, and now an MP in Kabul.

Mr Khan, who lost most of his family to a Taleban ambush this summer, said that since British troops pulled out a few weeks ago the town had become “a shelter for the Taleban”. He named the four main Taleban commanders controlling Musa Qala, and said that the new administration’s police chief and its principal leader, Mullah Malang and Haji Sher Agha, were a front for the Taleban. Mr Khan added that only four days ago the Taleban kidnapped Ahmad Shahan, a prominent local government official, from the centre of Musa Qala. He has not been seen since.

The Defence Secretary was questioned in the Commons after The Times revealed that the Taleban had returned to Musa Qala. Mr Browne played down the idea that Taleban influence had returned.

He said that neither he nor his officials had heard of Nafaz Khan, a militia commander and former police chief, who was injured fighting alongside the British, and voiced frustration at the reappearance of the Taleban. Article