How the IED changed the U.S. military How the IED changed the U.S. military Homemade bombs caused death, agony for troops and prompted changes in military equipment Post to Facebook How the IED changed the U.S. military Homemade bombs caused death, agony for troops and prompted changes in military equipment Check out this story on USATODAY.com: CancelSend A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Posted! A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. 24 To find out more about Facebook commenting please read the Conversation Guidelines and FAQs How the IED changed the U.S. military Gregg Zoroya , USA TODAY Published 5:23 p.m. ET Dec. 18, 2013 | Updated 10:29 a.m. ET Dec. 19, 2013 CLOSE x Share November marked 10 years since the first U.S. death in Afghanistan blamed on an improvised explosive device on Nov. 14, 2003. Video by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY Homemade bombs caused death and agony for troops and prompted changes in military equipment. Lt. George Lopez, left, and Staff Sgt. Tim McNiel inspect a bridge.

(Photo: Jack Gruber, USA TODAY) Story Highlights The IED has killed more than 3,000 U.S. troops and wounded 33,000 A weapon that costs a few hundred dollars each spawned a multibillion-dollar American response Elaborate equipment now protects troops, but doesn't guarantee their safety ZABUL PROVINCE, Afghanistan — Three sets of eyes peer out of a massively armored U.S. truck rolling slowly down Highway 1. From inside their reinforced cocoon — constructed layer upon layer with ways to protect the human cargo inside — three Arizona National Guard Army engineers scan highway edges. They look for signs of digging, suspicious debris or any other anomaly in the dirt that hints at a buried explosive. The rate of Americans dying or becoming dismembered by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), for 10 years the tormentor of U.S. forces, has dropped sharply as coalition troops withdraw from the battlefield. But lives still depend on what soldiers see or don't see. It's an enduring legacy of the homemade bomb that has created more American casualties over a decade and two wars than any other weapon.

What someone didn't see in the dirt along this same highway just 12 weeks earlier was a buried IED weighing hundreds of pounds. It killed 1st Lt. Jason Togi, 24, of Pago Pago, American Samoa, and an Afghan interpreter on a similar convoy mission riding in the same type of RG-31 armored truck. "There's certain catastrophic explosions that it does not matter if you're in some sort of titanium ball," said Col. William Ostlund, commander of U.S. troops in this province. So in the cramped quarters of the RG-31 this day, amid the smell of beef jerky and the cases of Burn and Rip It energy drinks, there lurks in the recesses of every soldier's mind one thought. Spc. Kyle Esplin, 22, who waits tables in Tucson; Spc. Brody Crane, 24, a part-timer at a Bass Pro Shop in Mesa, Ariz.; and Sgt. 1st Class Ramon Gomez, 33, who has a 5-month-old son, Emilio, back in Tucson, know that everything in their world could end in a violent millisecond.

"You don't want to think about it," Crane says over the vehicle intercom system. Somewhere between more than half to two-thirds of Americans killed or wounded in combat in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been victims of IEDs planted in the ground, in vehicles or buildings, or worn as suicide vests, or loaded into suicide vehicles, according to data from the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization or JIEDDO. That's more than 3,100 dead and 33,000 wounded. Among the worst of the casualties are nearly 1,800 U.S. troops who have lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority from blasts, according to Army data. A LETHAL WEAPON Last Slide Next Slide When one of the first Americans serving in Iraq, 25-year-old Pfc. Jeremiah Smith, 25, of Odessa, Mo., died in an explosion under his vehicle in May 26, 2003, six weeks after the U.S. invasion ended, the military wasn't even sure what to call the thing that killed him.

The Defense Department inadvertently applied an oxymoron, saying he was "hit by unexploded ordnance." Officials couldn't possibly know at the time that this weapon — what would come to be called in military parlance an improvised explosive device, a term now in common usage by those in and out of uniform — would be the most destructive of two wars. The terror of the weapon continues to this day. Even as American forces leave Afghanistan, small numbers of U.S. soldiers gamble their lives on bomb-ridden roads or pathways. November marked 10 years since the first U.S. death in Afghanistan blamed, when it happened, on an IED: Sgt. Jay Blessing, an Army Ranger, killed when the "thin-skinned" or unarmored Humvee he was driving was hit by a buried bomb Nov. 14, 2003. The military has since gone back to identify a few earlier cases that technically qualify as IED attacks, including the death of Navy SEAL Matthew Bourgeois, 35, of Tallahassee, from a land mine wired to homemade bombs near Kandahar on March 28, 2002.

The IED, made for as little as a few hundred dollars each and produced by the thousands yearly first in Iraq and then Afghanistan, has changed the arc of how America wages war and how military medicine cares for the wounded. It is a considerable feat for a triggering device made of wood and wire. Displayed at an IED investigative office at Bagram Air Base, they look like junior high workshop projects. CASUALTIES: Behind the numbers The bombs radically affected how the American military could move around the war zone, creating a heavy reliance on helicopters and other aircraft in order to avoid roads, says Army Lt. Gen. John Johnson, JIEDDO director. "They've caused us a lot of pain ... a lot of effort and a lot of treasure," Johnson says. Hundreds of millions in research dollars have been spent on understanding, identifying and treating the twin invisible maladies most often associated with these bombs: traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. Military and private researchers estimate the number of uniformed victims in the hundreds of thousands. The IED has given rise to a multibillion-dollar industry in vehicle and body armor, robots, ground-penetrating radar, surveillance, electrical jamming, counterintelligence, computer analysis and computerized prostheses.

The Government Accountability Office says it's impossible to estimate the total U.S. cost of fighting the bombs over two wars. But the Pentagon has spent at least $75 billion on armored vehicles and tools for defeating the weapons. In 2007, when American troops were losing limbs from blasts about every other day on average, the word IED — a military acronym for "improvised explosive device" — was so widely used it formally entered the American lexicon, accepted into Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Fours year later, at the height of the Afghanistan War, the pace of U.S. troops suffering major amputations increased to one every 36 hours. SURVIVING A BLAST They call it "going boom." The first time for Spec. Leif Skoog, 23, a roofer back in Phoenix, was Oct. 3. He and Crane were in an RG-31 that was pushing an 8,000-pound roller in front of the vehicle, a device designed to detonate anything buried before the truck passes over it. That's exactly what happened. The roller was destroyed, but the RG-31 survived.

For those inside, there was the shock of the explosion, painful ear pressure, air made black with billowing dirt and dust, and a chemical smell that burned the nostrils. Skoog, closer to the blast in the driver's seat, was stunned and disoriented. "It's not a physical wound," he recalls. "It's more like something doesn't feel right." He showed signs of a mild traumatic brain injury from blast exposure, what scientists call the signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. With dizziness, headaches and minor concentration problems, Skoog was kept out of combat for two weeks. Understanding the frequency of these wounds in a war where body and vehicle armor block shrapnel but the IED blast wave can still damage the brain was one of the hardest lessons learned by military medicine from modern wars. "It was like a slow awakening for everybody," says Chris Macedonia, a doctor and former adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now-retired admiral Michael Mullen.

"There were phenomena that were happening, particularly related to IEDs, that just didn't match what the education and teaching were before." Doctors found that repeated mild brain injuries from blasts — without allowing the brain time to heal — can cause permanent neurological damage, risking later onset of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or the even more debilitating chronic traumatic encephalopathy. A RAND Corp. report estimated in 2008 that perhaps 320,000 troops, even at that early date, had suffered concussions or mild brain injuries, mostly from blast exposure. Pentagon officials the next year put the number at 360,000. Most were never diagnosed when the wounds occurred and sent right back into combat, and no one knows the accurate number today, says Terri Tanielian, a RAND senior research analyst. Not until 2010, nine years into the fighting, did three military leaders — Mullen; retired general Peter Chiarelli, then-Army vice chief of staff; and Marine Commandant James Amos — push through sweeping battlefield treatment changes requiring blast-exposed troops to be pulled from combat until, as with Skoog, symptoms go away.

"It took us a long, long time," Macedonia says. "Too long." MORE PROTECTION FOR TROOPS As early as 2003, U.S. field commanders in Iraq began demanding for their troops something other than the boxy Humvees that were being ripped apart by this new weapon. Soldiers and Marines had taken it upon themselves to add so-called Hillbilly armor to their vehicles or pile sandbags on the floorboards. The Pentagon initially rushed kits to retrofit Humvees with better protection in 2003 and 2004. But the trucks remained vulnerable because of their "flat bottom, low weight, low ground clearance and aluminum body," a Pentagon inspector general report found. A Bush administration certain the Iraq War would be short-lived failed to supply large numbers of new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) trucks like the RG-31 until 2007. In the meantime, more than 1,400 U.S. troops died in IED blasts and 13,000 were wounded, according to JIEDDO data.

It was a USA TODAY story about the effectiveness of a limited number of MRAPs in saving the lives of Marines that led then-Defense secretary Robert Gates to order a crash program to churn out 27,000 of the trucks, including an all-terrain version for Afghanistan. 2007 STORY: Battlefield commanders pressed Pentagon for help The Pentagon says the trucks, featuring heavy armor and V-shaped hulls for deflecting blasts, saved thousands of lives. About $2 billion was spent training troops in dealing with IEDs, with elaborate exercises involving actors, explosions and fake gore set up in the California desert at Fort Irwin to mimic combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another $7 billion went for intelligence operations to dismantle networks financing, producing and placing IEDs. Today in the twilight of American involvement in Afghanistan, commanders are cutting the chance of death by IED even further. Missions to clear roads, among the last going "outside the wire," are pulling back to paved highways where burying bombs is harder. Clearance convoys are shadowed by Apache attack helicopters. Night missions, peripheral lights ablaze, look like roving football stadiums. And bomb-defeating technology on board has reached a crescendo.

The trucks are wrapped in netting that can deflect rocket-propelled grenades. Inside, soldiers wearing helmets, body armor, protective goggles and fortified underwear sit on shock-absorbing seats and track potential IED hot spots on computer screens. From inside their armored vehicles, they can remotely inspect and probe suspicious ground with long metal arms. They can deploy robots big and small. They have electronic jammers, ground-penetrating radar and giant IED-uncovering rakes. "There's been some crazy devices that we're not even going to use," Spc. Crane says about the many inventions provided to them. An Obama administration eager to put the IED chapter behind it has pledged to avoid long-term operations where the bombs are a threat. And as troops come home, the Pentagon is gradually turning much of its MRAP fleet in Afghanistan into scrap. STAYING ALIVE x Share 22nd Engineer Clearance Co. combat engineer soldiers talk about their mission to find and defeat improvised explosive devices. Video by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY When Arizona National Guard engineers were clearing roads in Zabul province on Nov. 17, Staff Sgt.

Alex Viola, 29, of Keller, Texas — a Green Beret on foot patrol in nearby Kandahar province advising Afghan troops — stepped on an IED and was killed.Four days earlier, another Green Beret — Staff Sgt.Richard Vazquez, 28, of Seguin, Texas — was killed by an IED on the same type of mission. Afghan civilians and troops are now suffering the brunt of IED attacks. But the bombs still kill and maim Americans, says Navy Capt. Dan Gramins, a vascular surgeon at a U.S. hospital in Kandahar, where a trickle of U.S. casualties from IEDs arrive each month. It was at this facility that Army Cpl. Joshua Hargis, a Ranger who lost both legs to an IED blast on Oct. 6, delivered the "salute seen around the world" from his hospital bed after receiving a Purple Heart that later went viral. If a soldier devastated by an IED can survive to reach a hospital, military doctors have become extremely proficient at saving them. "We're good at keeping them from dying," says Gramins.

"But I think as long as we're fighting IEDs, we're going to continue to have multiple amputees." The Arizona National Guard Army engineers will finish their 10-month deployment before Christmas. So there's a giddiness when a mission is over, as soldiers tumble out of their armored containers and bear-hug one another with exaggerated glee. Inside the wire, they know where they step is safe. "All of us know that when you go outside the wire," says Spec. Crane, "the threat is there." Contributing: Tom Vanden Brook and Paul Overberg 2496 CONNECT TWEET 20 LINKEDIN 24 COMMENTEMAILMORE Read or Share this story: NEVER MISS OUT The Short List Let us bring the headlines to you every night. Stay current and catch up on the biggest stories of the day. How the U.S. Quietly Lost the IED War in Afghanistan | Inter Press Service How the U.S. Quietly Lost the IED War in Afghanistan Print | U.S. Army Pfc. Shawn Williams is evacuated after being injured by a roadside bomb in Kandahar Province on Jun. 17, 2011.

Credit: DoD photo WASHINGTON, Oct 9 2012 (IPS) - Although the surge of “insider attacks” on U.S.-NATO forces has dominated coverage of the war in Afghanistan in 2012, an even more important story has been quietly unfolding: the U.S. loss of the pivotal war of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to the Taliban. Some news outlets have published stories this year suggesting that the U.S. military was making “progress” against the Taliban IED war, but those stories failed to provide the broader context for seasonal trends or had a narrow focus on U.S. fatalities. The bigger reality is that the U.S. troop surge could not reverse the very steep increase in IED attacks and attendant casualties that the Taliban began in 2009 and which continued through 2011. Over the 2009-11 period, the U.S. military suffered a total of 14,627 casualties, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System and iCasualties, a non-governmental organisation tracking Iraq and Afghanistan war casualties from published sources.

Of that total, 8,680, or 59 percent, were from IED explosions, based on data provided by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO). And the proportion of all U.S. casualties caused by IEDs continued to increase from 56 percent in 2009 to 63 percent in 2011. Related IPS Articles Despite Troop Surge, Taliban Attacks and U.S. Casualties Soared The Taliban IED war was the central element of its counter-strategy against the U.S. escalation of the war. It absorbed an enormous amount of the time and energy of U.S. troops, and demonstrated that the counterinsurgency campaign was not effective in reducing the size or power of the insurgency. It also provided constant evidence to the Afghan population that Taliban had a continued presence even where U.S. troops had occupied former Taliban districts. U.S. Pentagon and military leaders sought to gain control over the Taliban’s IED campaign with two contradictory approaches, both of which failed because they did not reflect the social and political realities in Afghanistan.

JIEDDO spent more than 18 billion dollars on high-tech solutions aimed at detecting IEDs before they went off, including robots, and blimps with spy cameras. But as the technology helped the U.S.-NATO command discover more IEDs, the Taliban simply produced and planted even larger numbers of bombs to continue to increase the pressure of the IED war. The counterinsurgency strategy devised by Gen. David Petraeus and implemented by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, on the other hand, held that the IED networks could be destroyed once the people turned away from the Taliban. They pushed thousands of U.S. troops out of their armoured vehicles into patrols on foot in order to establish relationships with the local population. The main effect of the strategy, however, was a major jump in the number of “catastrophic” injuries to U.S. troops from IEDs. In his Aug.

30, 2009 “initial assessment”, McChrystal said the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) “cannot succeed if it is unwilling to share risk at least equally with the people.” In an interview with USA Today in July 2009, he argued that “the best way to defeat IEDs will be to defeat the Taliban’s hold on the people.” Once the people’s trust had been gained, he suggested, they would inform ISAF of the location of IEDs. McChrystal argued that the Taliban were using “the psychological effects of IEDs and the coalition force’s preoccupation with force protection” to get the U.S.-NATO command to reinforce a “garrison posture and mentality”. McChrystal ordered much more emphasis on more dismounted patrols by U.S. forces in fall 2009. The Taliban responded by increasing the number of IEDs targeting dismounted patrols from 71 in September 2009 to 228 by January 2010, according data compiled by JIEDDO.

That meant that the population had more knowledge of the location of IEDs, which should have resulted in a major increase in IEDs turned in by the population, according to the Petraeus counterinsurgency theory. But the data on IEDs shows that the opposite happened. In the first eight months of 2009, the average rate of turn-ins had been three percent, but from September 2009 to June 2010, the rate averaged 2.7 percent. After Petraeus replaced McChrystal as ISAF commander in June 2010, he issued a directive calling for more dismounted patrols, especially in Helmand and Kandahar, where U.S. troops were trying to hold territory that the Taliban had controlled in previous years. In the next five months, the turn-in rate fell to less than one percent. Meanwhile, the number of IED attacks on foot patrols causing casualties increased from 21 in October 2009 to an average of 40 in the March-December 2010 period, according to JIEDDO records. U.S.

troops wounded by IEDs spiked to an average of 316 per month during that period, 2.5 times more than the average for the previous 10-month period. The Taliban success in targeting troops on foot was the main reason U.S. casualties from IEDs increased from 1,211 wounded and 159 dead in 2009 to 3,366 wounded and 259 dead in 2010. The damage from IEDs was far more serious, however, than even those figures suggest, because the injuries to dismounted patrols included far more “traumatic amputation” of limbs – arms and legs blown off by bombs – and other more severe wounds than had been seen in attacks on armoured vehicles.

A June 2011 Army task force report described a new type of battle injury – “Dismount Complex Blast Injury”– defined as a combination of “traumatic amputation of at least one leg, a minimum of severe injury to another extremity, and pelvic, abdominal, or urogenital wounding.” The report confirmed that the number of triple limb amputations in 2010 alone had been twice the total in the previous eight years of war. A study of 194 amputations in 2010 and the first three months of 2011 showed that most were suffered by Marine Corps troops, who were concentrated in Helmand province, and that 88 percent were the result of IED attacks on dismounted patrols, according to the report. In January 2011, the director of JIEDDO, Gen. John L. Oates, acknowledged that U.S. troops in Helmand and Kandahar had seen “an alarming increase in the number of troops losing one or two legs to IEDs.” Much larger numbers of U.S. troops have suffered moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries from IED blasts – mostly against armoured vehicles.

Statistics on the total number of limb amputations and traumatic brain injuries in Afghanistan were excised from the task force report. In 2011, U.S. fatalities from IEDs fell to 204 from 259 in 2010, and overall fatalities fell from 499 to 418. But the number of IED injuries actually increased by 10 percent from 3,339 to 3,530, and the overall total of wounded in action was almost the same as in 2010, according to data from iCasualties. The total for wounded in the first eight months of 2012 are 10 percent less than the same period in 2011, whereas the number of dead is 29 percent below the previous year’s pace. The reduction in wounded appears to reflect in part the transfer of thousands of U.S. troops from Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where a large proportion of the casualties have occurred, to eastern Afghanistan.

The number of IED attacks on dismounted patrols in the mid-July 2011 to mid-July 2012 period was 25 percent less than the number in the same period a year earlier, according to JIEDDO. The Pentagon was well aware by early 2011 that it wasn’t going to be able to accomplish what it had planned before and during the troop surge. In a telling comment to the Washington Post in January 2011, JIEDDO head Gen. Oates insisted that the idea that “we’re losing the IED fight in Afghanistan” was “not accurate”, because, “The whole idea isn’t to destroy the network. That’s maybe impossible.” The aim, he explained, was now to “disrupt them” – a move of the goalposts that avoided having to admit defeat in the IED war. And in an implicit admission that Petraeus’s push for even more dismounted patrols is no longer treated with reverence in the ISAF command, the August 2010 directive has been taken down from its website. *Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S.

national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. United States Police Story Why don’t the Generals take a walk with the troops during dismounted patrols. I guess it’s easy to order troops into harms way on a theory that may or may not work, but placing their lives in peril to prove it. I think the Generals should think about American lives and doing everything possible to save them instead of trying to stop a war that has been fought for hundreds of years. Big Fat Fred What an illuminating article! Smells considerably like real journalism. Very refreshing. Thank you. abouthadit the US military is always fighting the last war. How about just come home? Hakan Why do Americans love to plunder, mass murder and steal, while calling themselves civilized and their victims “terrorists” in the process? tom8422 I have a problem with the article’s findings and its central thesis. Reading the data that I see, one would say that the war on IEDs is not over (maybe it will never be over), but it hasn’t been lost, and the bad numbers that occurred in earlier years, appear to be improving.

This site, ( ) has done a very good job tracking all casualties (deaths) during the war in Afghanistan. This site is maintained by non-military people, and it tracks somewhat different data from the data quoted. It tracks total ISAF rather than just US casualties, and it tracks deaths rather than “total casualties,” which the article uses. However, while the data used is not the same, the data trends ought to be very similar. If you go to the graph in the right hand column titled “IED deaths by year,” you will see the trends that I am talking about. You can see that overall deaths in Afghanistan are down from a high in 2010. IED deaths during the same time period have dropped more precipitously—and IED deaths as a percentage of total deaths are decreasing not increasing. Another way to look at the data is that after extending 2012 totals out to the end of the year on a pro rata share basis, IED deaths will be lowest since 2007–and this decrease occurred during the increased fighting on the surge period. So how can the trends that you cite be correct?

Are the “other” casualties (death plus non-death) in the war changing at a different rate and in a different direction? That’s hard to believe! Mike Gareth Porter is a Liberal writer, writing for a “press service” funded by al jazeera- google him and just look at this site’s partners. This article is a scam! The increase in IED attacks during the period he discussed directly corresponds to the increase in NATO troops on the ground in Afghanistan. As the troop size doubled- more troops moving around on the battlefield- more IED attacks occurred- there were more targets. He conveniently leaves out many other facts that counteract successes on the battlefield. With the success in Iraq, Al Qaeda forces increased operations in AFG- essentially, as US forces surged, AQ extended their operations as they were kicked out of Iraq. This means that while IED fighting capability increased, this of course was seen against a heightened effort by AQ to counteract the effectiveness of the NATO surge. One thing US troops and their NATO partners have improved upon was their ability to diminish AQ-supported Taliban attacks. That is a fact.

This article states facts about IED attacks that are true, however the liberal, freelance writer makes false statements for the sole purpose of creating provocative material- and to get paid. YesMinster @ Mike “With the success in Iraq,” Which Kool Aid have you been drinking? The whole Iraq/Afg conflict is a political, social and military disaster. ISAF has been in Afg as long as WWI and WWII combined – and what have we achieved? – lots of mainly Afghani and Iraqi corpses, five thousand dead military and a few less dead ‘freedom fighters’. No security, no equality for women, worse health care and many more terror attacks than under Saddam. The Afghani people are dying, literally, to see ISAF leave so that they can return to a sustainable way of life for them that has existed for millenia. As Oliver Cromwell said to Parliament “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately … Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” Diogenes The wrong question is being asked.

We should be asking where the explosives for these IEDs come from – the Taliban have no industry or revenue apart from opium trafficking.Where are they getting their weapons, their ammunition, their funds to pay their fighters. Locate and destroy these sources in Pakistan, the Gulf States and in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban will implode from within. Belden Erhart Betrayus & Micky should of been ‘leading by example’ but as ‘elites’ – send poor kids to be maimed. 113th congress should be selected by ‘riding around’ Afghan till who survives wins district. TIME to leave AfPak to the ‘stone age’. Mine the 50 largest cities with appropriate sized Neutron picture takers in the event any crimes traced to them – if so, smile for the picture… IH8Dook People always talk about IEDs as if there is only 1 type of device. That’s like saying the USA has failed to stabilize crime in the country because it still happens. I cant imagine how many lives we would have lost, nor the terror on US soil if we had not developed jammers (CREW systems). RC-IEDs would be prolific.

Slickfoot Reasonable rules of engagement, instead of these absurd ones in place eg. no shooting at terrorists planting IEDs after dark, so as to not disturb the locals. Gary Rumain Are the IEDs all simply pressure sensitive or are there some that can be remote detonated? If it’s the latter, well accidents happen Gary Rumain I understand that most are being supplied from Iran and some from Pakistan. Blocking the sources or laying down land mines seems an apropos solution. Gary Rumain LOL! You’re so funny! “The Afghani people are dying, literally, to see ISAF leave so that they can return to a sustainable way of life for them that has existed for millenia.” That’s a keeper! Slickfoot IED simply means it is not an over-the-counter device and can be anything, initiated any way, limited only by imagination, the remote type are generally referred to as command detonated. Slickfoot Why don’t you ask the current administration, who are making the rules of engagement untenable… Don’t think for one damn minute that officers do not care about their men, or casually waste them.

Gary Rumain Yes, I’m familiar with what it means but I don’t really know anything about how they go about making them – apart from the basics. Slickfoot Try googleing a book published years ago an underground cult classic named ‘The Anarchist’s Cookbook’ and was just chock full of helpful tid-bits on how to make all sorts of nastys. We were actually issued manuals on what the local insurgents were making, and what they needed to make them. Gary Rumain Yes, I’d heard of that. I think it can be found on the net. I thought the tech was a little more modern now with the use of mobile phones and the like. Slickfoot Modern electronics have brought a whole new dimension to the mix, but still, all you are looking for are things that can close/open an electrical circuit, in order to cause rapid case expansion. johnny I have to give the Afghans a lot of respect, standing up against an invading army like that. It takes guts, and lots of them have died for that cause. Nice to see they can use their brains to pull together a real opposition in spite of limited resources! Gary Rumain Yep.

The principles of remote detonation are much the same too, regardless of what’s actually used. Editors' choice Afghanistan civilian casualties | News | theguardian.com Latest annual figures Afghanistan civilian casualties Annual Afghan casualty figures have fallen for the first time since the invasion. How many people have died? • Get the Afghan civilian casualties data Afghanistan civilian death casualties data: Afghan Police and local residents stand around a mini van carrying the bodies of the victims who were killed by a US soldier in Panjwai district in Kandahar. Photograph: I. SAMEEM/EPA A NATO airstrike on Monday left 11 Afghan civilians (10 of whom were children) dead. But 2013 might mark an improvement in Afghanistan 's conflict if the number of civilian casualties continues on its current trend. 2012, the latest year for which numbers are available, has shown the first drop since the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) first began collecting on civilian casualties. Though the total number of casualties fell by 9%, the number of deaths fell by 12%, while the number of injured actually rose by 2%.

Last year's figures bring the total number of civilians who have lost their lives in the armed conflict over the past six years to 14,728. 7,559 Afghan casualties were documented by UNAMA, of which 2,754 were deaths and 4,805 were injuries. The Taliban and other anti-government elements have been blamed for 4 out of every 5 civilians who were killed in Afghanistan last year - continuing a rising trend since 2007. The number of civilian deaths resulting from pro-government forces has by contrast fallen by 23%. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) killed the most Afghan civilians according to the UN, accounting for 41% of deaths in conflict. Between 1 January and 31 December 2012, UNAMA recorded 868 civilian deaths from IEDS.

More noticeable however, is the number of targeted killings - 698 in 2012, up 62% from 2011 United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan says: Particularly disturbing were targeted killings of women by Anti-Government Elements demonstrated by the killings of the head and deputy head of the Laghman Department of Women's Affairs in August and December 2012 [...] Civilians continued to be targeted in places including crowded markets, locations where tribal elders gathered and civilian Government offices. The report also suggests this might be part of a broader strategy from the Taliban: [I]n a statement released in August 2012, the Taliban identified civilian Government employees as lawful targets. The deliberate targeting and killing of civilian members of the Government administration is a violation of international humanitarian law which stipulates that military objects only may be the lawful objects of attack. While we are pretty good at providing detailed statistical breakdowns of coalition military casualties (and by we, I mean the media as a whole), we've not been so good at providing any kind of breakdown of Afghan civilian casualties. There has been some work done.

Human Rights Watch has published breakdowns of civilian casualties, and academics such as Mark Herold at the University of New Hampshire have done detailed reporting on very specific periods of the operation. Unama point out the difficulties with collecting the data: A key reason for the difference between the 2011 and 2012 data is that civilian casualty statistics often change following the public release of such figures, as UNAMA only reports civilian casualty figures verified through multiple sources. This verification is a rigorous and time-consuming process, which is affected by the security situation. UNAMA also takes steps to verify new cases identified through its monitoring – regardless of when the incident occurred. Once new cases are verified, UNAMA adds the cases its database. The numbers often change on a daily basis as new information is added (eg. injured victims dying, confirmation of the civilian status of victims, as well as new incidents). "Late" reporting is common and often occurs when UNAMA is verifying incidents in those areas which are extremely difficult to access or those incidents in which there is wide discrepancy between communities, government and security forces about what occurred. Sometimes, as has happened, it can take more than a year to fully verify.

UNAMA publicly reports civilian casualty figures through its mid-year and annual Protection of Civilians reports, press statements as well quarterly reporting to the UN Secretary-General. These documents are available online. You've noticed the gap in media reporting - asking us why we publish military deaths but not civilian casualties. The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) publishes statistics on civilian casualties, splitting them into deaths caused by government/military forces, anti-government forces and so on. True, they're not very visible on the UNAMA site and are not updated regularly in a visible way - but they do seem to be the best we can get. They published a report in February this year which has provided these details. Obviously, collecting accurate statistics in one of the most dangerous countries in the world is difficult. But the paucity of reliable data on this means that one of the key measures of the war has been missing from almost all reporting . But several of the older statistics in this report are different to what they were cited as being a few years ago. For example, the 2013 report claims that there were 3,131 conflict-related civilians deaths in Afghanistan in 2011.

The 2012 report however puts this number at 3,021. It is not clear whether these numbers have been updated, revised or simply misquoted. Where there is an inconsistency between the numbers, we've highlighted it and added a comment in the google spreadsheet attached. We've summarised the numbers above using the latest report from UNAMA. Take a look and let us know what you think - and what you can do with it. Data summary How the US Quietly Lost the IED War in Afghanistan by -- Antiwar.com Share This Although the surge of “insider attacks” on U.S.-NATO forces has dominated coverage of the war in Afghanistan in 2012, an even more important story has been quietly unfolding: the U.S. loss of the pivotal war of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to the Taliban. Some news outlets have published stories this year suggesting that the U.S. military was making “progress” against the Taliban IED war, but those stories failed to provide the broader context for seasonal trends or had a narrow focus on U.S. fatalities. The bigger reality is that the U.S.

troop surge could not reverse the very steep increase in IED attacks and attendant casualties that the Taliban began in 2009 and which continued through 2011. Over the 2009-11 period, the U.S. military suffered a total of 14,627 casualties, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System and iCasualties, a non-governmental organization tracking Iraq and Afghanistan war casualties from published sources. Of that total, 8,680, or 59 percent, were from IED explosions, based on data provided by the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). And the proportion of all U.S. casualties caused by IEDs continued to increase from 56 percent in 2009 to 63 percent in 2011. The Taliban IED war was the central element of its counter-strategy against the U.S. escalation of the war. It absorbed an enormous amount of the time and energy of U.S. troops, and demonstrated that the counterinsurgency campaign was not effective in reducing the size or power of the insurgency.

It also provided constant evidence to the Afghan population that Taliban had a continued presence even where U.S. troops had occupied former Taliban districts. U.S. Pentagon and military leaders sought to gain control over the Taliban’s IED campaign with two contradictory approaches, both of which failed because they did not reflect the social and political realities in Afghanistan. JIEDDO spent more than 18 billion dollars on high-tech solutions aimed at detecting IEDs before they went off, including robots, and blimps with spy cameras. But as the technology helped the U.S.-NATO command discover more IEDs, the Taliban simply produced and planted even larger numbers of bombs to continue to increase the pressure of the IED war. The counterinsurgency strategy devised by Gen. David Petraeus and implemented by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, on the other hand, held that the IED networks could be destroyed once the people turned away from the Taliban. They pushed thousands of U.S. troops out of their armored vehicles into patrols on foot in order to establish relationships with the local population. The main effect of the strategy, however, was a major jump in the number of “catastrophic” injuries to U.S.

troops from IEDs. In his Aug. 30, 2009 “initial assessment,” McChrystal said the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) “cannot succeed if it is unwilling to share risk at least equally with the people.” In an interview with USA Today in July 2009, he argued that “the best way to defeat IEDs will be to defeat the Taliban’s hold on the people.” Once the people’s trust had been gained, he suggested, they would inform ISAF of the location of IEDs. McChrystal argued that the Taliban were using “the psychological effects of IEDs and the coalition force’s preoccupation with force protection” to get the U.S.-NATO command to reinforce a “garrison posture and mentality.” McChrystal ordered much more emphasis on more dismounted patrols by U.S. forces in fall 2009. The Taliban responded by increasing the number of IEDs targeting dismounted patrols from 71 in September 2009 to 228 by January 2010, according data compiled by JIEDDO.

That meant that the population had more knowledge of the location of IEDs, which should have resulted in a major increase in IEDs turned in by the population, according to the Petraeus counterinsurgency theory. But the data on IEDs shows that the opposite happened. In the first eight months of 2009, the average rate of turn-ins had been three percent, but from September 2009 to June 2010, the rate averaged 2.7 percent. After Petraeus replaced McChrystal as ISAF commander in June 2010, he issued a directive calling for more dismounted patrols, especially in Helmand and Kandahar, where U.S. troops were trying to hold territory that the Taliban had controlled in previous years. In the next five months, the turn-in rate fell to less than one percent. Meanwhile, the number of IED attacks on foot patrols causing casualties increased from 21 in October 2009 to an average of 40 in the March-December 2010 period, according to JIEDDO records. U.S.

troops wounded by IEDs spiked to an average of 316 per month during that period, 2.5 times more than the average for the previous 10-month period. The Taliban success in targeting troops on foot was the main reason U.S. casualties from IEDs increased from 1,211 wounded and 159 dead in 2009 to 3,366 wounded and 259 dead in 2010. The damage from IEDs was far more serious, however, than even those figures suggest, because the injuries to dismounted patrols included far more “traumatic amputation” of limbs — arms and legs blown off by bombs — and other more severe wounds than had been seen in attacks on armored vehicles.

A June 2011 Army task force report described a new type of battle injury — “Dismount Complex Blast Injury”— defined as a combination of “traumatic amputation of at least one leg, a minimum of severe injury to another extremity, and pelvic, abdominal, or urogenital wounding.” The report confirmed that the number of triple limb amputations in 2010 alone had been twice the total in the previous eight years of war. A study of 194 amputations in 2010 and the first three months of 2011 showed that most were suffered by Marine Corps troops, who were concentrated in Helmand province, and that 88 percent were the result of IED attacks on dismounted patrols, according to the report. In January 2011, the director of JIEDDO, Gen. John L. Oates, acknowledged that U.S. troops in Helmand and Kandahar had seen “an alarming increase in the number of troops losing one or two legs to IEDs.” Much larger numbers of U.S. troops have suffered moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries from IED blasts — mostly against armored vehicles.

Statistics on the total number of limb amputations and traumatic brain injuries in Afghanistan were excised from the task force report. In 2011, U.S. fatalities from IEDs fell to 204 from 259 in 2010, and overall fatalities fell from 499 to 418. But the number of IED injuries actually increased by 10 percent from 3,339 to 3,530, and the overall total of wounded in action was almost the same as in 2010, according to data from iCasualties. The total for wounded in the first eight months of 2012 are 10 percent less than the same period in 2011, whereas the number of dead is 29 percent below the previous year’s pace. The reduction in wounded appears to reflect in part the transfer of thousands of U.S. troops from Kandahar and Helmand provinces, where a large proportion of the casualties have occurred, to eastern Afghanistan.

The number of IED attacks on dismounted patrols in the mid-July 2011 to mid-July 2012 period was 25 percent less than the number in the same period a year earlier, according to JIEDDO. The Pentagon was well aware by early 2011 that it wasn’t going to be able to accomplish what it had planned before and during the troop surge. In a telling comment to the Washington Post in January 2011, JIEDDO head Gen. Oates insisted that the idea that “we’re losing the IED fight in Afghanistan” was “not accurate,” because, “The whole idea isn’t to destroy the network. That’s maybe impossible.” The aim, he explained, was now to “disrupt them” — a move of the goalposts that avoided having to admit defeat in the IED war. And in an implicit admission that Petraeus’s push for even more dismounted patrols is no longer treated with reverence in the ISAF command, the August 2010 directive has been taken down from its website. (Inter Press Service) The only way to win is not to play.

Tom Mauel I casualties reports at least 17 Afghan soldiers killed in attacks across the country. Civilians Killed & Wounded | Costs of War Civilians Killed & Wounded Social & Political Civilians Killed & Wounded A woman walks past the scene of a bomb attack in Baghdad Jan. 29, 2007. A bomb in a small bus killed one civilian and wounded five others, police said. (REUTERS/Ceerwan Aziz) The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of March 2015, approximately 210,000 civilians have died violent deaths as a result of the wars. Civilian deaths have also resulted from the US military operations in Yemen that began in 2002. People living in the war zones have been killed in their homes, in markets, and on roadways. They have been killed by bombs, bullets, fire, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and drones.

Civilians die at checkpoints, as they are run off the road by military vehicles, when they step on a mine or cluster bomb, as they collect wood or tend to their fields, and when they are kidnapped and executed for purposes of revenge or intimidation. They are killed by the United States, by its allies, and by insurgents and sectarians in the civil wars spawned by the invasions. Death can also happen weeks or months after a battle. Many times more Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis have died as a result of battered infrastructure and poor health conditions arising from the wars than directly from its violence. For example, war refugees often lose access to a stable food supply or to their jobs, resulting in increased malnutrition and vulnerability to disease. The Costs of War reports document the direct and indirect toll that war takes on civilians and their livelihoods, including the lingering effects of war death and injury on survivors and their families. Key Findings Approximately 210,000 Afghan, Iraqi, and Pakistani civilians have died violent deaths as a direct result of the wars. War deaths from malnutrition, and a damaged health system and environment likely far outnumber deaths from combat.

Recommendations The US government should include civilian deaths and injuries in public reporting of war deaths, including a tally of children killed. (Page updated as of March 2015) War in Afghanistan: The Jig Is Up by -- Antiwar.com Share This The last several years of US operations in Afghanistan have been an exercise in mondo message management. If it were a sport, it would be the highlight of the ESPN X Games. Between Afghanistan and the "war of perception" in Iraq, students of so-called "strategic communications" will be studying this stuff (the art of deception, the artful dodge) for years. Spin Doctor Gen. David Petreaus can’t fix this one At the top of the syllabus: the far from hidden reality-chasm. That’s the wide, black gulf – what Rod Serling might call the Twilight Zone, a "wondrous dimension of imagination" – between what is happening on the ground in Afghanistan, and the much more "nuanced," if not false picture the military and administration officials have been painting all along.

Of course, that’s all come down in a crashing thud this New Year, as leaks regarding the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) have indicated that the "surge" of troops President Barack Obama authorized in 2009 (more than 50,000 total) has done very little to ensure long-term stability in Afghanistan. In fact, according to this assessment, the country is at risk of devolving into chaos – even if President Hamid Karzai were to sign that pesky pending Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) keeping several thousand US/NATO combat troops inside Afghanistan to assist security. From The Washington Post : A new American intelligence assessment on the Afghan war predicts that the gains the United States and its allies have made during the past three years are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report. … Some officials have taken umbrage at the underlying pessimism in the report, arguing that it does not adequately reflect how strong Afghanistan’s security forces have become.

One American official, who described the NIE as "more dark" than past intelligence assessments on the war, said there are too many uncertainties to make an educated prediction on how the conflict will unfold between now and 2017, chief among them the outcome of next year’s presidential election. We can probably guess who "some officials" are: military officials and/or Pentagon civilians who’ve always been critical of the Afghanistan NIEs, which are cumulative assessments from 16 national intelligence agencies, and are issued periodically, usually for congressional eyes only. In fact, the military has been so frustrated by these reports in the past, that when former Gen. David Petraeus, the Don Draper of military media management , took over the CIA in 2011, he immediately tried to manipulate the assessments from the inside, his way. From The Associated Press in October 2011: CIA analysts now will consult with battlefield commanders earlier in the process as they help create elements of a National Intelligence Estimate on the course of the war, to more fully include the military’s take on the conflict, U.S. officials say. Their input could improve the upcoming report card for the war.

The most recent US intelligence assessment offered a dim view of progress in Afghanistan despite the counterinsurgency campaign Petraeus oversaw there and painted a stark contrast to the generally upbeat predictions of progress from Petraeus and other military leaders. Petraeus has made no secret of his frustration with recent negative assessments coming primarily from the CIA, and said during his confirmation hearing that he planned to change the way the civilian analysts grade wars. It should be no surprise that the NIE for 2008 was never released to the public, nor the one in 2010 , though we know from leaked reports via WikiLeaks and major newspapers at the time, that they were decidedly grim, indicating a "downward spiral," in Afghanistan, "throwing cold water" on the Pentagon’s assessments. But alas, as Petraeus and his COINdinista warriors have found out the hard way, wars cannot be won behind smoke-n-mirrors alone. While they were doing all they could to dissuade us of the truth, the American people smelled a failing war all along. For years, approval ratings have been tumbling down.

In October 2011, one-third of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans of Afghanistan were already saying those wars weren’t worth fighting (what kind of message were they possibly getting when Gen. Petraeus, who just six months before was testifying that Afghanistan was finally progressing , ups and leaves his command in the middle of it all to head the CIA?) Now, today, public approval for the war is the lowest for any conflict in American history . As one military official told the late Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings while he was penning The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan , "if anyone can spin their way out of this war, it’s Petraeus." But while he did a great job spinning his own role in the war, he was never able to convince the rest of us that his Potemkin road to progress was anything but a highway to hell. "Petraeus keeps claiming progress, despite the fact that violence keeps going up," wrote Hastings, who covered the period in Afghanistan through May 2011. Hastings was able to find people who weren’t exactly on-script, and suggested Petraeus and his officers weren’t always hip to the jive themselves.

"Petraeus hates Afghanistan," an unnamed Afghan official who worked with Petraeus tells Hastings in the book. "Petraeus is already looking for an out," Hastings surmises, noting that the celebrated general had already been in talks with former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates about leaving the Army and becoming CIA director. By August 2011, Hastings writes, "Petraeus has exited gracefully." Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Petraeus’ predecessor in Afghanistan, had a less graceful exit in June 2010, thanks to Hastings’s reporting. But while we remember him for the comments that got him in trouble, the real takeaway from Hastings’ long interviews with McChrystal and his loose-lipped inner circle is they were having real misgivings about the war in 2010 and 2011. They got more isolated from the truth (and from events on the ground), and became cynical about everything. At one point McChrystal tells Hastings that progress is "questionable." But of course they told congress and the American people the opposite.

They enlisted their surrogates in Washington to enjoin full-throttle media blitzes for the so-called "surge" in 2009 and faith in Petraeus’ COIN strategy in 2010. If not for Hastings, much of this disconnect would have been lost to history. "A succession of American military commanders and their civilian superiors have never told the American public about the true nature of the conflict or the futility of our military effort in Afghanistan," noted (Ret.) Col. Doug Macgregor, author of Warrior’s Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Easting , in an email to Antiwar.com. He called "the pressure on Karzai to sign the security agreement" now "simply a last ditch effort, like the one in Iraq with (Prime Minister Nouri al) Maliki, to conceal the United States’ immense military failure in Afghanistan." There’s plenty of evidence of media manipulation , like canceling embeds for specific operations, hiding civilian casualties, or weeding through reporters for compliancy. Downplaying IED violence was one of the most egregious ways they tried to hide the truth.

Consider that at the same time Petraeus and McChrystal were touting progress – cooking up metrics showing a rapid capture/kill rate of top Taliban leaders, and a reversal of the Taliban’s momentum countrywide – the number of IED injuries and deaths among US soldiers were actually spiking , a dark measure most Americans are clueless about to this day. From an excellent analysis by Gareth Porter in September 2010: Without putting his statement in quotation marks, (Wall Street) Journal reporters Julian E. Barnes and Matthew Rosenberg reported Petraeus as claiming that the use of IEDs “has generally flattened in the past year”. While crediting US military operations with this alleged improvement, Petraeus said it is too soon to say that they are the sole reason for this alleged flattening of IED incidents. But the data for 2009 and 2010 provide no support for Petraeus’ “flattened” description. In fact, at the beginning of 2011, doctors and nurses working in Afghanistan reported a new "signature wound" – soldiers stepping on IEDs planted in the ground and suffering so gravely that often both legs had to be amputated up toward their pelvic areas.

Antiwar.com did a piece on the new "dismounted complex blast injuries" in March 2012. A year earlier, The Washington Post reported: Twice as many US soldiers wounded in battle last year required limb amputations than in either of the two previous years. Three times as many lost more than one limb, and nearly three times as many suffered severe wounds to their genitals. In most cases, the limbs are severed in the field when a soldier steps on a buried mine. Then there were the soldiers themselves, coming forward with real stories about the way things were going. The establishment hive has tried to undermine these and so many other truth-tellers. But as it’s become clear, whether it’s Matthew Hoh , or Lt. Col. Danny Davis , people who’ve been there and did not have a career interest in maintaining the successful war narrative, have seen a very different war unfold.

"Entering this deployment," Davis wrote in the explosive Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort , released in 2012 with an accompanying op-ed in The Armed Forces Journal, "I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency … (I) merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress. "Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level." In the AFJ piece he was just as forthright: "What I saw (in Afghanistan) bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by US military leaders about conditions on the ground." Which brings us back to today, and the NIE. Despite billions in so-called strategic communications spending (that not only includes public diplomacy abroad but recruitment, advertising and public affairs at home, a grand total of $4.7 billion in 2009 alone ), the American people plainly have had enough. Pick your cliché – lipstick on a pig, selling ice to Eskimos – no one is buying it anymore.

The military can’t keep up with the bad news coming out of Afghanistan anyway. This week we heard of the increasing malnutrition rates among children (complete with heartbreaking photos of skeletal children with distended stomachs), and violence against women being more brutal than the year before. Two US soldiers have already been killed in hostile fire in 2014. The latest NIE is just one more nail in the coffin. There is no way the ghosts of the Petraeus era still clinging to the meme are going to spin their way out of this one. To put it bluntly, the jig is up. Follow Vlahos on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos . Read more by Kelley B. Vlahos Afghan Civilians | Costs of War Social & Political Afghan Civilians Afghan villagers sit near the bodies of children who were reported to have been killed during a NATO airstrike in Kunar province on April 7, 2013. (Photo: Reuters) The war in Afghanistan continues destroying lives, due to the direct consequences of violence and the war-induced breakdown of public health, security, and infrastructure. Civilians have been killed by crossfire, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), assassinations, bombings, and night raids into houses of suspected insurgents.

Even in the absence of fighting, unexploded ordnance from previous wars and United States cluster bombs continue to kill. Hospitals in Afghanistan are treating large numbers of war wounded, including amputees and burn victims. The war has also inflicted invisible wounds. In 2009, the Afghan Ministry of Public Health reported that fully two-thirds of Afghans suffer from mental health problems. Prior wars and civil conflict in the country have made Afghan society extremely vulnerable to the indirect effects of the current war. Those war effects include elevated rates of disease due to lack of clean drinking water, malnutrition, and reduced access to health care. Nearly every factor associated with premature death — poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, environmental degradation — is exacerbated by the current war. While Afghanistan has benefited from investments in health care that may ameliorate some of the effects of war, the results are mixed, with improvement in some areas, such as infant mortality, balanced by continuing or growing needs in other elements of public health. About 104,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan war since 2001. More than 31,000 of those killed have been civilians.

An additional 41,000 civilians have been injured since 2001. Key Findings As of August 2016, more than 31,000 civilians are estimated to have died violent deaths as a result of the war. Many Afghans dealing with ill health and war wounds find it difficult to get to hospitals and clinics because violence makes roads unsafe. The war has exacerbated the effects of poverty, malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of access to health care, and environmental degradation on Afghans’ health. Recommendations The US government should ensure that civilian deaths and injuries are included in public reporting of war deaths. It should include a tally of children killed. (Page updated as of August 2016)

Question: In the war in Afghanistan many lives have been lost due to IEDs planted by the Taliban. What is an IED ?
Answer: IMPROVISED EXPLOSIVE DEVICE