Reporter's Notebook: The View from Afghanistan

Dec. 16, 2010— -- President Obama today declared that his strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is "seeing significant progress," but that is not necessarily matched by conditions on the ground -- especially when you speak to Afghans living with conflict every day.

The strategic review released Thursday lumps Helmand and Kandahar provinces in Afghanistan together as the places where progress is being made. But an ABC News/Washington Post poll, released just last week, suggests that while Helmand has made huge improvements, Kandaharis are deeply doubtful that the future will be positive.

Case in point: two-thirds of all municipal jobs in Kandahar City are unfilled. People are just too scared to work for the government because the Taliban remain strong enough to assassinate anyone they want. And that's in the city -- some of the rural areas are even less secure.

Then there are the provinces that haven't had a surge of U.S. and NATO forces. In many of these areas, insurgent momentum is actually positive.

In the west -- rural Heart and Badghis, along the Iranian and Turkmenistan borders -- fighters from Helmand have arrived in recent months to launch a targeted assassination campaign and to make the roads too dangerous to travel. Conditions are much worse there than they were a year ago, according to local residents.

In the North -- in a large swath from Faryab in the northwest to Takhar in the northeast -- criminality, vacuums of governance, and warlords have combined with Taliban to reduce the writ of the government. The best measure of that: you simply cannot drive from anywhere in the north to Kabul without being stopped by the Taliban, who scan cell phones for evidence of work with Westerners or the government. Conditions there are worse than they were a year ago, according to local residents.

At the same time, it's important to note that there are pockets of success around Kunduz, where a U.S. surge brigade landed this summer. And targeted killings by U.S. and Afghan special operations forces have weakened insurgent groups. But Afghans say that hasn't translated into improvements in their lives.