Effective IED attacks in Afghanistan soar
Published: April 8, 2010
The number of effective roadside bomb attacks in Afghanistan increased four-fold in March compared with a year ago, according to the Joint IED Defeat Organization.
There were 112 effective roadside bomb attacks in Afghanistan in March, up from 26 effective attacks in March 2009, according to figures released by JIEDDO. U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan increased by about 50,000 during that time period.
The overall number of effective roadside bomb attacks in Afghanistan more than doubled from 387 in 2008 to 820 in 2009, the figures show.
One reason for the increase is the Taliban realize that roadside bombs are a useful tactic, said Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, head of JIEDDO.
Not only are roadside bombs cheap to make and effective on the battlefield, but they also serve a strategic purpose, Oates told reporters at a roundtable on Thursday.
“Every one of those wounded or killed has a strategic impact on the will of the American people and the Europeans, and so the enemy reads the papers and understands all of that,” he said.
But Oates is optimistic that the situation in Afghanistan will improve in the coming year.
“There’s more coalition force moving into the area that’s going to reduce the enemy’s ability to emplace IEDs and more importantly will allow us to safeguard the population, which is going to give us more information about who is actually employing these,” he said.
The Afghan government has banned fertilizer with ammonium nitrate, which is used to make bombs, but the ban has yet to show results, Oates said.
Oates repeatedly played down Iran’s role in providing assistance to insurgents in Afghanistan.
“I would just caution you against defaulting that all material we find there comes from Iran,” he said. “We do some pretty good forensics to try and discover origins, and what we do find in many cases that a lot of this material can be obtained on the black market.”
“I don’t want to falsely accuse anybody without good evidence,” he added.
