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US Troop Deaths Double in Afghanistan
The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared with the same period last year as the United States has added tens of thousands of additional troops.
KABUL - The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared with the same period last year as the United States has added tens of thousands of additional troops.
Two US Marines rush a wounded comrade across a field to a waiting Army medevac helicopter, in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Those deaths have been accompanied by a spike in the number of wounded, with injuries more than tripling in the first two months of the year and heading in the same direction based on the latest available data for this month.
U.S. officials warned that casualties are likely to rise as the Pentagon completes its deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and sets its sights on the Taliban's home base of Kandahar province, where a major operation is expected in coming months.
"We must steel ourselves, no matter how successful we are on any given day, for harder days yet to come," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last month.
In total, 57 U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan in the first two months of 2010 compared with 28 in January and February of last year, an increase of more than 100 percent, according to Pentagon figures compiled by The Associated Press.
At least 20 U.S. service members have been killed this month, compared with 13 a year ago.
The steady rise in combat deaths has generated less public reaction in the United States than the spike in casualties last summer and fall, which undermined public support in the U.S. for the American-led mission.
After a summer marked by the highest monthly death rates of the war, President Obama faced serious domestic opposition over his decision in December to increase troops in Afghanistan, with only about half the U.S. people supporting the move. But support for his handling of the war has improved since then, despite increased casualties.
The latest Associated Press-GfK poll at the beginning of this month found that 57 percent of those surveyed approved his handling of the war in Afghanistan, compared with 49 percent two months earlier. The poll surveyed 1,002 adults nationwide and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said the poll results could partly be a reaction to last month's offensive against the Taliban stronghold of Marjah in Helmand province, which the Obama administration painted as the first test of its revamped counterinsurgency strategy.
Some 10,000 U.S., NATO and Afghan forces seized control of the farming community of about 80,000 people while suffering relatively few deaths. But the Taliban continue to intimidate the locals, and the hardest part of the operation is to come: building an effective local government that can win over the loyalty of the people.
"My main thesis ... is that Americans can brace themselves for casualties in war if they consider the stakes high enough and the strategy being followed promising enough," O'Hanlon said. "But such progress in public opinion is perishable, if not right away then over a period of months, if we don't sustain the new momentum."
The rise in the number of wounded â€" a figure that draws less attention than deaths â€" shows that the Taliban remain a formidable opponent.
The number of U.S. troops wounded in Afghanistan and three smaller theaters where there isn't much battlefield activity rose from 85 in the first two months of 2009 to 381 this year, an increase of almost 350 percent. Fifty U.S. troops were wounded last March; in comparison, 44 were injured during the first six days of March this year.
The increase in casualties was partly driven by the higher number of troops in Afghanistan in 2010. U.S. troops rose from 32,000 at the beginning of last year to 68,000 at the end of the year.
"We've got a massive influx of troops, we have troops going into areas where they have not previously been, and you have a reaction by an enemy to a new force presence," said NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale.
The troop numbers have continued to rise in 2010 in line with the recent buildup. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that one-third of the additional forces, or 10,000 troops, are already in Afghanistan. They plan to have all 30,000 troops in the country before the end of the year.
U.S. officials have said they plan to use many of the additional forces to reassert control in Kandahar province, where the insurgents have slowly taken territory over the past few years in an effort to boost their influence over Kandahar city, the largest metropolis in the south and the Taliban's former capital.
Many analysts think the Kandahar operation will be much more difficult than the Marjah offensive because of the greater dispersion of Taliban forces, the urban environment in Kandahar city and the complex political and tribal forces in the province.
The goal of both operations is to put enough pressure on the Taliban to force them to the negotiating table to work out a political settlement to end the war.
20 Comments so far
Show AllIt interesting that the operation against the so called "Stonghold of Marjah" was exposed as a fraud and a calculated attempt to manage public perceptions in the United States towards the war in Afghanistan, yet articles such as this repeat the propaganda as fact.
March 2009 - "My main thesis is that Americans can brace themselves for casualties in war if they consider the stakes high enough..." Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy expert at the Brookings Institution
May 24, 2005 "See in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." (who the fuck said this?)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." Joseph Goebbels, Hiter's Nazi Propaganda Minister.
i'm just sayin'...
More troops, more targets.
But what nearly every article written on the American war crimes in Afghanistan fails to mention is that the real objective is a trans-Afghan pipeline system.
Even "progressive" journalists rarely mention the oil and gas issues.
This general plan has been named, "Pipelineistan". Just give that word a Google.
Unfortunately, this is a case of public debt for private profit as they are spending more on the "war" than the resources are worth. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is now about $1 Trillion and counting with no end in sight.
But there are criminal MIC profits to be made by simply waging "war" and potential profits for the private energy corporations planning to market Central Asian oil and gas throughout Asia via Afghanistan.
But as Kipling once wrote about British Imperialism:
"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier OF the Queen!"
Although today it is a case of being a soldier for the corporation.
Right on!
Yeah, guerilla war, not everybody's cup of tea, I suppose. You'd think the U.S. woulda learned that in Vietnam.
Not learning from prior experience, isn't that a sign of disconnection from reality at the very least, if not worse? Empire envy trumps reality.
As I have written many times before, the Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan have a several thousand year history of fighting off foreign invaders. They repulsed Alexander the Great, the British Raj, the Russians, and now are doing an excellent job on the United States and its UN allies.
One of the biggest problems we face is that, as the Pentagon has often said, it costs $1 million a year to keep a soldier in Afghanistan. It costs $100,000 or more to kill an Afghan carrying a rifle, not counting the civilians destroyed in the drone strikes. Also remember, every time we fire a Hellfire missile into a village, we are recruiting perhaps a hundred or more angry fighters bent on killing us or driving us out. Most Afghans have rifles, it is part of their cultural heritage. The Afghans make their weapons in caves in the hills, cost negligible. They make their ammunition in caves in the hills, cost negligible.
So, if it costs us $1 million to keep a man in the field and it costs an Afghan a bullet or two to take him out, you do the math.
This is disgusting....REALLY disgusting!
I say, "Power to the noble Afghan freedom fighters defending their country from the brutal and cowardly foreign invaders!"
In the last line of the story, AP reports,
"The goal of both operations is to put enough pressure on the Taliban to force them to the negotiating table to work out a political settlement to end the war."
This is 100% unadulterated Pentagon propaganda being recycled here.
The UN, Karzai and the Taliban have all been eager to get peace talks under way. It is opposition by the USA and the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization and their insistence on continuing the pointless military operations that is standing in the way of peace in Afghanistan.
Remember, no matter what sort of censure is brought to the table by the UN on war crimes and brutality, the United States, with its permanent seat on the "Security Council" has the ability to veto it, and it does.
People lash out at the UN for being ineffective, but the main problem is that, when the UN was set up, the "victors" of WW-II were not about to submit to anything over a hundred nations proposed, unless it favored them. The Security Council was formed so that the majority had no say but "lip service."
During the "Cold War" the CCCP regularly vetoed anything that benefited the US and the US regularly vetoed anything that would benefit Russia.
Now, we regularly veto anything that criticizes or limits excesses by either the US, its surrogate NATO, or Israel.
The only way to make the UN an effective body is to abolish the Security Council and have the members join the commonality of membership. Also, give the UN some teeth as peacekeepers. Sadly, right now, the UN Peacekeepers are just arms of various dictatorships mostly put in power by our MIC for their own profit.
Again, that is controlled by the "Security Council," i.e., us.
All excellent points. The security council definitely needs to be abolished.
Those maimed in mind and body has trippled in this pointless exercise of corporate greed.
Chains we can believe in?
Dafoe
The US and other countries chasing rainbows in Afghanistan should remove themselves now, not next month or next year but now. Let the Afghanis solve their own problems, after all it does belong to them, we invaded the place did we not. You may not like their way of life or admire the more extreme form of their religion, that is your problem and sticking your nose in will not help.
You will not bring peace through victory(read barrel of a gun) it must come through justice. Didn't you learn that from VietNam, aren't the "Roosians" telling you that from their 10 year lost scrap there?
What does it take to drive the truth home? Keep your nose out of other peoples business unless you are asked.
So much for the patriotic bullshit that flows from the pentagon and congress, america can do no wrong, when the truth is it has seldom done anything right.
According to CNN today -- OBAMA just announced that "WE WILL KEEP THE TALIBAN RUNNING".....
someone should tell him:
"REALLY?"
Must be slow news day.
Depending on what periods are compared here how the headline would sound:
For optimists:
"US troop deaths in Afghanstan in the first three months of 2010 are 10% lower than in the last three months of 2010 year"
For pessimists:
"US troop deaths five times higher in the first three months of 2010 compared to first three months of 2008"
Personally I would have picked 2008 vs 2010, has a greater impact on the reader.
As a fraction of the total casualties in Afghanistan, the US is losing almost nobody, and everybody it loses went there to kill, anyway.
The real disaster is that if the US casualty rate doubled, the total casualty rate probably doubled (more or less), too. While that number includes a small number of terrorists and other bad guys, it primarily comprises innocent noncombatants and patriots.
Of course, the US military really doesn't know how many it kills, how many are killed by others, or who is killed. And, since its primary job is killing, that is equivalent to saying it doesn't know what is doing.
Atta person, "GonzoNews"! Don't ever let a discussion of Afghanistan elude the topic of the Pipeline. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who quit in disgust when he saw Anglo-American central asian policies up close, said that it's all about pipelines from the Caspian Sea gas fields, he'd seen the documents. Besides, he astutely pointed out, if we are after Al-Qaeda, who are in Waziristan in the North-east, why are we sending our "surge" to Helmund province in the South? Maybe because that's where the pipeline (we've wanted for over 10 years) is going?
Spreading ourselves kind'a thin, don't ya' think?
Taking over towns; winning hearts and minds...
Yea Right!
Look out ahead, we have a lot of ground to control and resupply.
On top of the cost of this operation, we are doing very little to stop that big bully Taliban from intimidating the people into accepting their aid or ours.
I can see the next two U.S. elections centering on getting out of Afghanistan. How much money have we spent? And for what? This is NOT an oil rich country! Opium maybe.