As US military officials continue to laud the progress in the Afghan War, they continue to release official war data which shows that, quite to the contrary things are getting calamatously worse.
Today’s release comes in the form of a report on IED attacks, which showed that the number of attacks and the number of casualties both soared in 2010. This would be bad enough but it is in the wake of a 2009 toll that was itself enormously higher than 2008.
The toll showed a 60 percent increase in deaths, with 268 US troops killed in 2010. This was also about the same number as were killed in all of 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined. This was despite claims from officials that the Pentagon several times during 2010 that the number of IEDs was “falling.”
The number of wounded was even worse, however, with figures showing a 178 percent increase from 2009 to 2010, and 3,366 confirmed injuries from IED atacks. This was dramatically more than had been wounded by IEDs in the entire rest of the war.