In case you missed it in the legendary Friday news dump, the Pentagon says that the Taliban have "coalesced into a resilient insurgency"

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that this wasn't breaking news on Friday, something that some precocious young Pentagon trend-spotter just happened to notice, and said, "By golly, I wonder if Secretary Gates knows about this." Actually, since the news came in the form of a report that was sneaked out on Friday, this startling conclusion was presumably known, well, at least days earlier.

In fact, according to the AP's Lolita C. Baldor:

The report was released Friday along with a separate plan for the development of Afghan security forces. They are the first two comprehensive Pentagon reports to evaluate progress in Afghanistan.

Vast problems -- corruption, the illegal poppy trade, human rights abuses and slow progress in reconstruction -- were detailed, as well as the struggle to train and equip the Afghan Army and police.

The report described a dual terror threat in Afghanistan that includes the Taliban in the south, and "a more complex, adaptive insurgency" in the east. That fragmented insurgency is made up of groups ranging from al-Qaida and Afghan warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's radical Hezb-i-Islami group to Pakistani militants such as Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Insurgents will continue to challenge the government in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and the may also move to increase their power in the north and west, the report predicted.

The assessment was bluntly pessimistic as it described efforts to train the Army and police.

Now possibly the report could have been released earlier in the week, when it would have been likely to receive more normal media attention. Perhaps that was the plan, and the Pentagon supply office simply ran tragically short of those shiny report folders -- or maybe even, gasp, staples! Wouldn't you think they go through a lot of staples in an average week at the Pentagon? Let's say you forget to reorder one week. Boy, are you going to have a lot of loose papers!

In a panic you call over to Foggy Bottom to see if the State Department guy's got any staples he can spare, and it turns out she is a Colin Powell gal, still nursing grievances over the boss's serial humiliations at the hands of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. No help there! So you mobilize a massive national-security crisis effort, and finally, in the wee hours of Friday morning, you lay hands on enough staples to release the report -- just in time to catch all those press guys 'n' gals heading out for the weekend.

The Friday news dump is a cherished D.C. institution -- in fact, it's probably known and beloved of governments all over the world. But in the Bush regime it's become something of an art form -- no, an entire genre.

One of the many things I cherished about Rachel Maddow's old morning show on Air America Radio was the regular Monday feature in which they sifted through the weekend dump to see what the regime was legally compelled to release and least wanted brought to public attention. There was always something.

Now, I'm hoping Rachel still does this on her evening show (which airs at an impossible time for me). Frankly, though, this is a feature you'd think would be emulated by, well, every news outlet in the country. Gradually readers and viewers could be trained to look forward to weekly treasures from the dump. It could become a highlight of the weekly news calendar. Why, it's possible to imagine Friday becoming the worst day of the week for these awkward disclosures.

That is, of course, if our news media were actually interested in reporting the news.

Meanwhile, perhaps the Pentagon will have some thoughts on how to deal with the mess in Afghanistan. Check back on Friday.

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