The leader of the Pentagon’s $19 billion bomb squad has a straightforward way to measure how the war in Afghanistan is going: count the number of things that go boom. And by that measure, the war isn’t going well at all. In January 2011, there were 1,344 explosive attacks in Afghanistan. For perspective, in all of 2005, there were only 465 homemade insurgent bombs country-wide.
“When that volume [of bombs] starts dropping, then I think you can start making some assumptions about the effectiveness of the overall counterinsurgency,” Lt. Gen. Michael Oates told a small group of reporters ahead of his departure on Friday from the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO. But the bomb volume isn’t dropping: November saw the highest monthly total of the entire war, with 1,508 explosions
Contrast that with January’s letter to the troops in Afghanistan from their commander, Gen. David Petraeus. Petraeus wrote that NATO has made “enormous progress” in Afghanistan, “halt[ing] a downward security spiral” and turning 2010 into a year of “significant, hard- fought accomplishments.” From Oates’ perspective, that’s measured in the meager drop of the level of bombs from the November high back to where they were in… September, when 1,377 bombs went off.
But Oates insisted that it was “statistically not correct” to say that the U.S. is “losing the IED fight.” Since the August, fewer than 25 percent of insurgent bombs have killed or injured anyone, according to numbers compiled by the bomb squad. Oates said he was heartened by that recent statistical trend, which he attributed to a surge of sensors, from giant tethered blimps to video-equipped drones to chemical-sniffing planes to trusty dogs.
Click for Full Text!
