Taliban Bombings Hit Record High in November – 1,500 - Are They Trying to Tell Us Something?

Borrowed from Wired


By Spencer Ackerman

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.
Read more here http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/taliban-bombs-hit-new-high-1500-in-november-alone/?utm_source=co2hog