Taliban Bombs Hit New High; 1500 In November Alone

[n2doc]

By Spencer Ackerman December 8, 2010

The bad news first: insurgents in Afghanistan have constructed more homemade bombs in the past six months than at any time during the nine-year-long war. But those bombs are killing and injuring fewer U.S. and allied forces. Most attempts at blowing up U.S. troops just fail.

According to new figures provided to Danger Room by the Pentagon’s anti-improvised explosive device task force, known as JIEDDO, the Taliban and its allies built 1507 homemade bombs just in November 2010 alone, an all-time high. That’s nearly 100 more than the 1415 they made the previous month — the reigning IED record in Afghanistan. July, August and September all saw monthly bomb totals of between 1374 and 1391; all of which were higher than June’s 1314. And their geographic distribution follows the pattern of violence in the war: 75 percent of them occurred in the southern provinces like Helmand and Kandahar where most of the surge troops are. The surge clearly hasn’t been able to stop the growth in the bomb rate.

But JIEDDO considers those figures to conceal a greater success. Most of the bombs didn’t do any damage. November’s high-water mark killed 24 U.S., NATO and Afghan troops and wounded 301 others. But in June, when there were almost 200 fewer bombings, 52 troops died and 297 were wounded.

That’s a pattern that largely held through the summer: a fairly steady uptick in incidents, but with a relatively low rate in those killed and injured. JIEDDO calculates the improvised-bomb success rate — in which a homemade bomb hurts someone — in November at 17 percent. (Some homemade bombs kill and/or wound more than one person, so it’s not a simple matter of tallying the killed/wounded figure and dividing by the number of bombs.) In June, that success rate was 21 percent, and from July to September it ticked up to 24 or 25 percent before dipping back to 21 percent in October.

more
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/taliban-bombs-hit-new-high-1500-in-november-alone/

End the F$$%#ing WAR NOW

[aquart]

1. Did they get money from anyone but us?

[msongs]

2. bad things happen to people who occupy another peoples' country nt

[Catherina]

3. Rec'd for your last line "End the F$$%#ing WAR NOW" n/t