WASHINGTON, Nov 16: The United States will have to support the Karzai government for at least a decade to ensure that the Taliban and their allies do not overrun Kabul, says CIA chief.

In testimonies before the Senate Armed Services Committee Director CIA Gen Michael V. Hayden and the director of Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency, Lt-Gen Michael D. Maples, warned US lawmakers that the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces were re-emerging in Afghanistan.

America’s top spy masters painted a bleak picture of the situation in Afghanistan during two days of congressional hearing that ended on Thursday.

They warned that Al Qaeda extremists were using the techniques they learned in Iraq against the US and allied forces in Afghanistan as well. The two intelligence chiefs claimed that the Taliban and Al Qaeda operators had found ‘new havens’ in the region for launching attacks inside Afghanistan but did not name the places.

Gen Hayden told the committee that both Taliban and Al Qaeda were back in Afghanistan, waging a "bloody insurgency" in the south and east of the country.

The US, he said, will have to continue to support the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai for "at least a decade" to prevent the extremists from overrunning Kabul.

The CIA chief, who visited both Afghanistan and Iraq recently, said that Al Qaeda was using “the lessons learned in Iraq” for planning and executing attacks inside Afghanistan.” He noted the increased use of roadside bombs and the relatively new phenomenon of suicide attacks, which had not been seen in Afghanistan before the Iraq war.Gen Hayden told the Senate panel that the Taliban, aided by Al Qaeda, "has built momentum this year" in Afghanistan and that "the level of violence associated with the insurgency has increased significantly." He also noted that the Karzai government was “nowhere to be seen" in many rural areas, leaving an open field for the Taliban to recruit fighters.