Updated: Mar. 2, 2011; 6:02 p.m. EST
The leader of the Pentagon's $19 billion bomb squad has many ways to measure how the war in Afghanistan is going. One is to count the number of things that go boom. And by that measure, the war isn't going well at all - despite a "surge" of thousands of fresh American troops and a fresh strategy that puts a premium on wiping out militant networks.
In January 2011, there were 1,344 bombs discovered or detonated in Afghanistan. That's essentially the same number of explosives as there were seven months earlier, in June of 2010. Yet wintertime is ordinarily when there's a lull in Afghanistan's fighting. (For perspective, in all of 2005, there were only 465 homemade insurgent bombs discovered country-wide.)
"When that volume [of bombs] starts dropping, then I think you can start making some assumptions about the effectiveness of the overall counterinsurgency," Lt. Gen. Michael Oates tells a small group of reporters ahead of his departure on Friday from the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO. But the bomb volume isn't dropping: November saw the highest monthly total of the entire war, with 1,508 explosions.
The raw bomb number isn't Oates' only battlefield metric. He's also keyed in on the number of "effective" explosive attacks -- the ones that actually kill or injure someone. By that measure, there's been some progress: a 25% effectiveness rate has dropped to 16%, according to numbers compiled by the bomb squad. It means that "the enemy is 84% ineffective," the general says. The number of coalition troops killed or wounded in action has been halved, during that period. Oates adds that he's heartened by that recent statistical trend, which he attributed to a surge of sensors, from giant tethered blimps to video-equipped drones to chemical-sniffing planesto trusty dogs.
"But because the volume has not dropped, this tells us the enemy still has the motivation, he has the financing, he has the precursor material and he has the ability to emplace IEDs," Oates concedes. "Until the volume drops, we have to assess that the enemy is still actively trying to kill or injure us with IEDs and he still has that capability." An effort to stop the importation of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from Pakistan, the main component of homemade bombs in southern Afghanistan, hasn't yet stanched the increase of the bombs.
Contrast Oates' bracing words with January's letter to the troops in Afghanistan from their commander, Gen. David Petraeus. Petraeus wrote that NATO has made "enormous progress" in Afghanistan, "halt[ing] a downward security spiral" and turning 2010 into a year of "significant, hard-fought accomplishments."
After fourteen months at the helm of JIEDDO, Oates will retire from the Army and return to his home in Texas, handing over the wartime bomb squad to Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, whom he's known since both were green lieutenants. Barbero is just back from Iraq, a factor that Oates says guides his departure: being too far removed from the wars limits the director's efficacy, especially on Capitol Hill, where criticism of JIEDDO's $19 billion expenditures has been an on-again, off-again pulse.
For all JIEDDO's sponsorship of tech-intensive solutions for the bombs -- JIEDDO is asking Congress for $2.8 billion for the next fiscal year -- Oates says the next big project from the squad will be one that provides "a better understanding of the social dynamics behind how the enemy operates," including how insurgent bomb networks communicate, pay people, "motivate people" and replenish their ranks. He didn't elaborate, but it sounds like an insurgent-focused version of the Army's tumultuous experience trying to use sociological tools to understand human networks in foreign cultures.
Asked what it meant that the U.S. doesn't understand that after nearly a decade in Afghanistan, he replies, "It says we're still pretty ignorant about a lot of cultures in this world."
JIEDDO was set up as an emergency task force in 2004 to stanch the newfound bombs' lethality in Iraq and Afghanistan, and eventually, as the wars end, it may shuffle off the Pentagon's mortal coil. But Oates says he's confident Army and Marine training, vehicle purchases and body armor reflect an understanding that cheap, improvised bombs aren't going away: every month, outside of the two wars, between 300 and 400 detonate worldwide. Oates says he's generally concerned about the migration of bomb tech to Latin America, where drug cartels and rebel groups might use them -- especially as Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad forges greater ties to the region -- and a successful bomb attack will "probably occur" within the U.S., he says.
In Afghanistan, at least so far, insurgents haven't felt the need to change up their bombmaking strategies, even as their effectiveness has diminished. In the south and southwest, the Taliban's bombs are still made from fertilizer, detonated through the compression of metal-free pressure plates, usually made of wood, when someone walks or drives over them to complete a circuit. Only the insurgent network of Jalaleddin Haqqani in eastern Afghanistan uses a limited amount of "military grade munitions" and remote-controlled detonations.
What will ultimately stop the bombs in Afghanistan? According to the lessons of Iraq, it's no big secret: a secure population, an "effective counterinsurgency strategy," competent Afghan soldiers and cops, "lethal targeting" of insurgents, and "some kind of political reconciliation." Still, it's worth noting that according to JIEDDO's figures, there were over 400 bomb attacks in Iraq in January alone, which might say something about what "success" in the fight against the signature weapon of the U.S.' two long wars actually looks like.
Illo: JIEDDO; photo: explosive attack simulation, courtesy U.S. Army
See Also:
- Pentagon's Bomb Squad Gets a New Boss
- Afghan Bombs Kill, Wound 3800 Troops in 2010
- Stopping Afghanistan's Fertilizer Bomb Factories
- Secret New Sensors Sniff For Afghanistan's Fertilizer Bombs
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