The last few months in the US war in Afghanistan has regularly had the same story: US airstrikes in the country are on the rise, and the highest in years. September saw 751 bombs dropped, which is the highest since November of 2010, which saw 866.
It’s not that the strike are just a little bit higher each month, either. The 751 figure of September was nearly 50% up over August, when the US dropped 503 munitions. Increasingly, the US is back to the bad-old-days of the war’s peak years.
President Trump recently announced a massive escalation of the US war in Afghanistan, with large but secret deployments of new ground troops into the country. The air campaign, however, had been on the rise far longer than that.
The Afghan government has been losing territory to the Taliban in several parts of the country for years. The US, desperate to slow the rate of losses, has been increasing strikes, including easing the restrictions on strikes nowhere near US ground troops.
This must be one of those “reality” things.
Anyone whose ever hiked at high elevations knows that these deployments are a mostly a joke. Nothing’s gonna change on the ground, because you can’t move mud from the air; and traipsing around with a rucksack and gear at 14,000ft is hard as hell on its own, nevermind with people shooting at you from *somewhere*