A secret Nato report compiled by intelligence officers has revealed that the Afghan government is losing popular support to the Taliban.
The report, seen by Sky News, also reveals that the Taliban continues to be supplied with roadside bombs by Pakistan’s secret service.
It is the most comprehensive analysis of a new Taliban campaign to win Afghan hearts and minds ahead of the end of Nato combat operations by 2014.
It is based on 27,000 interviews with 4,000 detainees - Taliban fighters, foreign insurgents and al Qaeda guerrillas.
Pakistan exercises direct control over senior Taliban commanders, some of whom live very close to the offices of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI).
Insurgent groups are supplied with "electronics expertise, remote detonators, advanced explosives, mines and suicide vests" to attack Nato soldiers and Afghan government targets.
Pakistan has long played a double game in the region, fighting its domestic Taliban movement while keeping Afghanistan unstable to prevent its arch enemy, India, from gaining a foothold through the government of Hamid Karzai in Kabul.
But the most dramatic findings of the report show the Taliban is successfully occupying the moral high ground among ordinary Afghans.
"Local villagers report a surprising level of satisfaction with Taliban decrees. Conversely favourable government of Afghanistan rulings tend to require bribes, which many simply cannot afford," the report says.
The Taliban, it said, has decided to limit acts of brutality last year and co-ordinate with local elders over where to place mines.
The radical Islamic group, which was deposed by a US-led international coalition in 2001 for allowing Osama bin Laden a safe haven, has even set up mobile telephone helplines which villagers can use to report abuses of them by Taliban officials.
Meanwhile, many of the government forces have "secretly reached out to insurgents, seeking long-term options in the event of a possible Taliban victory".
The arms bazaar in Miran Shah, the Pakistani base of many Taliban groups, has seen a surge in Afghan government weapons for sale, and even the distinctive Ford Ranger vehicles provided by the US to the Kabul forces which have been sold or donated by Afghan soldiers to the Taliban, the Nato intelligence report said.
The report will be a devastating blow to western governments and other contributors to the international military effort to shore up the rule of the Kabul government.
Officials have been stressing how successful the programme to hand security control over to the government and that 50% of the country has already made this transition.
Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, the Nato spokesman in Kabul, dismissed the secret report by saying that the organisation did not see "any reason to take these findings of the investigation to reconsider or readjust our (own) findings".
Many soldiers who have fought in Afghanistan have come to similar conclusions to the Nato report on their own. They frequently note that the Afghan government forces have a predatory relationship with local people and in the case of the police are frequently linked to drug lords - both of which undermine faith in central government.
In Helmand, where 9,000 British and about 30,000 American troops have been locked in fierce fighting, the report said that even in areas under government and Nato control, the Taliban run a parallel administration.
It also names a senior former Pakistani military officer as being the main link between the Islamabad government and the Taliban. It notes that the Haqqani family, which leads a ferocious Taliban faction in the east of Afghanistan, has safe havens close to the Pakistani secret service headquarters in Islamabad, and in Miran Shah.
But the close relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan is not a cosy alliance of fellow Islamic radicals.
Peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government may soon open in Saudi Arabia and another set may get started in Qatar. But this may be in defiance of the ISI's wishes.
"Taliban members believe that neither Pakistan nor the government of Afghanistan are willing to allow a peaceful end to the war, and therefore forsake the considerable material gains to be garnered from the conflict, the reports says.
Significant government officials in Afghanistan are closely linked to the opium trade, worth over $4bn a year and to ISI-related groups which smuggle drugs through Pakistan.
On top of that many members of the Karzai administration have become vastly rich from protection rackets and trucking contracts taking Nato supplies to soldiers on the front.
Neither of these trades can be expected to thrive if peace broke out.
Pakistan, meanwhile, is anxious, the report said, to keep Afghanistan in a state of chaos so that India cannot get a toe-hold.
Pakistani foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar said the report should be disregarded as a "strategic leak".
"These claims have been made for many years," she said.
