Later this week, the White House will release its assessment of the war’s fortunes. And while Defense Secretary Gates said last week that the 2010 troop surge “reversed” the Taliban’s momentum, it hasn’t rolled back the insurgents’ ability to wreak havoc with improvised explosives.

They’ve been building bombs at a far faster clip, and even if they’ve not been able to kill people with them as efficiently as they used to, they’re killing and maiming more people with them. Nearly as many Afghan civilians have died this year from the bombs as last year — a big, flashing warning sign for the war. If this is reversing Taliban momentum, it would be scary to see what their unbroken momentum would look like.

Danger Room acquired these and other figures from the Pentagon’s bomb squad, known as JIEDDO, which provided us with stats on improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan from 2005 to this November.

The figures don’t distinguish between U.S. and allied troops. But they provide perhaps the most comprehensive public look to date into how deadly Afghanistan’s fertilizer-based bombs are. They killed two-thirds of the approximately 2050 U.S. and allied troops who’ve died in action in Afghanistan in the past five years.

The most recent casualty figures are especially striking. With a month left to go in 2010, improvised explosive devices have killed 413 NATO troops and wounded 3,400, for a total of 3,813 casualties. That’s about 1,000 more dead and wounded — an increase of over a third — than the toll from last year, when bombs took 2,785 allied victims. The bombs have killed and maimed 2,484 Afghan soldiers and cops so far this year, 32 more than in 2009.

The bombs’ toll on Afghan troops and civilians have been far more severe.

JIEDDO’s figures show that improvised explosive devices have killed 4,208 Afghan civilians since 2005, with nearly a quarter of those — 1,065 — dying this year. If current rates of civilian casualties hold, there will be as many civilian deaths from the bombs as last year, when 1,119 Afghans died. That’s not a positive sign for a war strategy predicated on protecting Afghans from harm.

From the perspective of troops tasked with stopping the bombs, the jump in bomb “events” — those that cause harm and those that don’t — has been huge. In 2005, there were 465 bombs reported by the military, a figure that’s risen every subsequent year. Last year, that grew to 8,894 events, before spiking at 13,481 with a month to go this year. That’s a growth of more than 50 percent in just one year.

But the bombs’ lethality has decreased. In 2008, 4,061 insurgent bombs killed and wounded 5,059 NATO and Afghan troops and civilians — about 12.5 casualties for every 10 bombs. And for each of the previous three years, there had been more casualties than bombs. But that flipped last year, when 8,894 bombs killed or wounded only 8,611 people. So far this year, the bombs’ effectiveness rate has been even worse, causing 9,488 victims despite more 13,000 bombs, or about seven casualties for every 10 bombs.

That indicates that JIEDDO has a point when it told Danger Room on Wednesday that homemade bombs have recently gotten less potent. The provided statistics don’t allow for an apples-to-apples comparison of the bomb squad’s claim that the bombs have only been about 20 percent effective in the latter half of 2010.

But it’s possible to draw some related conclusions. In November 2010, NATO bomb squads detected 933 bombs early, out of 1,507 attacks, for a successful detection rate of 61 percent. JIEDDO figures show 52 percent of this year’s 13,481 bombs were detected early. In 2009, that rate was just under 51 percent. The year before, it was 49 percent.

While JIEDDO has lauded the array of sensors, video-capturing drones, bomb-sniffing dogs and other tools to spot improvised explosives that the Pentagon has shipped into Afghanistan in the past two years, the early-detection rate appears to remain static.

Nor are Afghans turning in many bombs, something military commanders often cite as a proxy for judging local sympathies. This year, Afghans turned in 238 bombs, fewer than 2 percent of all bombs in the country. Last year, turn-ins accounted for 2.3 percent of all bombs. And in 2005, a comparatively quiet year in Afghanistan, turn-ins accounted for 10 percent of bomb incidents.

All that indicates that the Taliban may not be able to kill and maim as efficiently with their bombs as they used to. But the sheer numbers of their bombs show no sign of slowing, and that means more casualties, civilian and military.

The United States has long accepted that it can’t kill its way to success in Afghanistan. But with a consensus developing in NATO on drawing down troops — if not necessarily leaving — maybe the Taliban isn’t under any similar restriction.

Photo: Noah Shachtman

See Also:

• Fighting Afghanistan’s Dumbed-Down — and Deadly — Bombs
• Pentagon Bomb Squad Backs Super Snipers, Mini-Bots, Secret Spy …
• $19 Billion Later, Pentagon’s Best Bomb-Detector Is a Dog
• New Way to Stop Roadside Bombs: Super-Soak ‘Em
• Taliban Bombs Hit New High — 1500 in November Alone

Authors: Spencer Ackerman

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