THE bloodshed in Afghanistan has reached levels not seen since the 2001 invasion as anger at bungling by an ineffective Government in Kabul and its foreign backers stokes support for the Taliban and other extremist groups.
The death of Trooper David Pearce underlines the rising dangers for Australia's 1000 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them deployed in the Taliban's southern heartland -- a region some of Canberra's NATO allies consider too dangerous to fight in.
"This place can only go up or down, and it's going down fast, which is something the international community simply will not understand," said a security analyst who has been working in and out of Afghanistan for 30 years.
Almost six years after the hardline Islamist Taliban were ousted, their insurgency is gaining strength, fuelled by resentment at NATO bombing of civilians, billions of dollars of wasted aid, a lack of jobs and record crops of opium, the raw material for heroin.
The fighting is spreading to places once relatively safe, including the capital and the western and northern parts of the country.
"This is a guerilla movement but it does seem to have a real momentum behind it at the moment," said Joanna Nathan, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank headed by former foreign minister Gareth Evans.
In Kabul, where suicide bombs have killed almost 50 people in two weeks, foreigners are increasingly ordered into "lockdown" -- barred by employers from leaving their heavily protected compounds, often behind armed guards, razor wire and concrete blast walls.
"It's all now too close -- people are jumpy," said a UN official who has lived in the dusty, chaotic city ringed by mountains for four years.
The revitalised Taliban have switched tactics back to traditional guerilla warfare after attempts to take on foreign troops under separate NATO and US commands in pitched battles last year resulted in heavy casualties.
"They never evaporated into thin air. The Taliban were there, they have been there and they are here now," said government adviser and former minister Hamidullah Tarzi, carrying his trademark silver pistol.
"One reason for their renewed strength is that the people are more or less amenable to what they are doing and maybe some of the (NATO) bombardments have not been very wisely executed.
"That has helped the people get closer to the Taliban. They are dying and they feel that they are the same (as the Talibs) from the religious point of view."
Scores, possibly hundreds, of civilians have been killed in air strikes, mainly called in to support ground troops fighting rebels. The US-led NATO force, government officials and village leaders differ over details and numbers.
The Taliban-led insurgency is also being bolstered by drugs money -- the UN reported a 50per cent jump in this year's opium crop -- local and tribal disputes, and a lack of jobs.
With the wrecked economy and the dangers of getting crops to market, being a paid fighter for the Taliban is often the only way isolated Afghans can feed their families.
"It's important to emphasise: I don't think the Taliban themselves are wildly popular," Ms Nathan said.
"I don't think people want Taliban times back. It is a broad dissatisfaction with what is happening in the country now. I think the Taliban are very clever at appealing to people or groups that are locally disenfranchised or disempowered."
The Taliban shelter and train in neighbouring Pakistan -- once the group's main sponsor -- and President Pervez Musharraf faces international pressure to do more to stop them.
But the border, a random line in the sand drawn by British colonial rulers, passes through rugged, inhospitable territory and divides fiercely loyal ethnic groups who have never been fully controlled by any government for centuries. General Musharraf and NATO generals say stemming the flow of fighters is a tough task.
While some analysts say Tehran may be supporting the Taliban, most say no firm evidence has surfaced, rejecting Defence Minister Brendan Nelson's suggestion that the bomb that killed Trooper Pearce might have been made with supplies from Iran.
"He made that comment before any proper investigation had been done," said one soldier serving with NATO.
Much of the violence in Afghanistan is rooted in ordinary crime as the conflict erodes security and the rule of law and young men desperately seek money.
"Some of my friends don't have jobs. They just walk the streets. They talk among themselves of kidnapping a foreigner just to make some money," said "Sayed", a university business student who did not want his real name used.
Guns are easy to come by and drug addiction in the country that supplies almost all the world's opium is rising.
Unemployment is near 40 per cent and many Afghans live in appalling conditions, with no running water, sewerage or electricity. Roads are poor and in the capital -- crammed with tens of thousands of squatters camped in mud brick huts -- most middle-class residents are lucky to have power a few hours a day.
"People thought democracy would give them everything -- jobs, roads, electricity, water -- but nothing of this sort has happened," Mr Tarzi said.
"In fact, it's getting worse. There is a lack of jobs, a lack of employment. Overall, nothing much has been done.
"The money that has come in has not been productive in relation to industrialisation."
Confidence in the Afghan Government, the first democratically elected administration in three decades, is fading fast.
President Hamid Karzai, 49, the philosopher and former freedom fighter who has ruled this country since 2001, faces criticism for his failure to stamp out the Taliban and raise living standards.
Dubbed "the mayor of Kabul", because he rarely leaves his palace and his Government's writ barely extends beyond the capital, Mr Karzai is battling to balance the demands of the people who elected him with those of the foreign backers who prop up his Government.
He is also undermined by the fact his administration has control over only a small share of the billions of foreign aid dollars spent in his country.
Mr Karzai is not a popular leader, his critics say, accused of being ineffective and indecisive. In Kabul and many parts of the country his public portraits and banners are dwarfed and outnumbered by those of Ahmed Shah Masood, a popular mujaheddin leader assassinated by al-Qa'ida two days before the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001.
Domestically, Mr Karzai relies on a ragtag collection of former warlords, mujaheddin freedom fighters, ex-communists and others for support and is locked in a power struggle with his parliament. The President and the legislators -- a large number of whom are illiterate -- are coming to grips with democracy as much as with each other.
Mr Karzai has been criticised for failing to sack or prosecute corrupt officials and of handing out jobs as political favours to shore up support.
His Government has also failed to make serious inroads into the $3.3billion-a-year opium industry, which is tightly intertwined with the conflict and has been breaking production records almost every year since the Taliban's fall.
"The narcotics and insurgency feed into each other," said Ms Nathan.
Trooper Pearce, 41, a father of two, was killed when his convoy was hit by a roadside bomb in southern Uruzgan province, a major opium centre where Australian and Dutch troops are working on reconstruction.
Although it is a volatile area and a centre of Taliban support, the Dutch forces had forged close links with community leaders, cutting down the fighting, until a botched poppy eradication program by a US private security firm a few months ago, analysts say.
"Uruzgan was going OK until they went in with tractors and started ripping the poppy fields up," said the Kabul-based security analyst. "The Dutch had a good relationship with the people down there, the local leaders, but when they rip up your crop, what do you do? You grab your gun. They didn't even do that much damage to the crops in the end."
Australian troops make up a fraction of the 50,000 foreign forces in Afghanistan, and opinion is divided about how effective Canberra's contribution is.
"It's more symbolic," Mr Tarzi said. "I think (John) Howard is trying his best to see what (US President George W.) Bush is thinking, and he's going along that line.
"He should concentrate more on what his people, the Australians, think. He is just following Mr Bush."
But Australia is one of a small group of countries -- along with the US, Britain, Canada and The Netherlands -- willing to send its soldiers to where most of the fighting is.
Some European countries refuse to deploy their troops to the volatile south. Several members of the NATO-led force impose tough -- and, critics say, absurd -- limits, or caveats, on how their soldiers can be used, with some barring their units from fighting in the snow, above certain altitudes or at night.
Ms Nathan said: "It is incredibly important to have nations who are prepared to go south in a robust way, to go down there not laden by caveats; to go down there to do what is needed, when it's needed, how it's needed."
