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Yesterday, October officially became the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the war began. The death toll was pushed over that grim marker by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the single deadliest weapon used against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. IED deaths have increased alongside U.S. troop increases every year since the U.S. invaded.
Paraphrasing Joint IED Defeat Organization Director Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, Stars and Stripes reported today that:
IED attacks in Afghanistan have gone up along with the rising troop levels and likely will continue to increase if more U.S. forces are sent there…
That’s a real problem for the measure of success set out by General Stanley McChrystal for the U.S. effort in Afghanistan:
American success in Afghanistan should be measured by “the number of Afghans shielded from violence,” not the number of enemy fighters killed, he said.
What’s the connection? Well, it turns out IEDs are also the single greatest conflict-related killer of civilians. The fact that the use of IEDs increases along with U.S. troop deployments explains the similarity between these two graphs:
Military officials have warned that sending more troops to Afghanistan will likely result in a “tough fight” (read: rising U.S. casualty rates). If President Obama adds more troops in Afghanistan, especially in densely populated areas, get ready to see another major spike in civilian deaths as well.
Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.
5 Comments
GHW Bush’s CIA totally busted for their direct involvement in running the drug trade and the government in Afghanistan:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?_r=1
Poppy production is protected by the CIA – that’s where the Shadow Government (Rockefeller/Poppy Bush) gets its funding.
Do you really believe that there are fewer than 250 Afghan civilians dying a month? Try ten times that figure.
I also love the way the officials want us to think the only reason Afghan civilians die is because they kill each other. That’s good war time propaganda of course but surely this audience is a tad more sophisticated?
In a rare moment of honesty didn’t the White House say they were sending more “trigger pullers”?
There’s no data for Afghanistan but if its like anywhere else the number one killer due to the war is the growth of easily preventable diseases due to the destruction of civilian infrastructure. ie biological warfare. The US used that technique to murder seven digits of Iraqis.
You are absolutely correct that the numbers shown above are without doubt an under-count. The Afghan NGO Safety Office cautions that regions reporting little or no violence can indicate extreme instability. The problem is that we just can’t confirm them. The above count is the UNAMA count, and it only includes those confirmed to be killed directly in connection to the conflict. Disease and degradation of infrastructure don’t figure into this total.
The fact that there is a ratio of 12 foreign troops to 1 Taliban fighter makes this all the more sickening.
You want IED’s?
Try Viet Nam.