WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON -Military commanders in Afghanistan are bracing for a sharp increase in roadside and suicide bomb blasts as insurgents escalate attacks on allied troops and Afghan civilians, and as thousands of U.S. reinforcements pour into the country.
Already, improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, cause 75 percent of all U.S. casualties in Afghanistan and are the leading cause of Afghan civilian deaths, according to U.S. and United Nations data. With 21,000 more troops on the way, the bombings are expected to intensify, posing a challenge to the Obama administration's strategy and to the U.S. military's high-tech countermeasures.
U.S. field commanders say the Taliban and other insurgents have launched an intensified campaign of terror and intimidation, using primitive bombs buried in roadbeds or detonated in crowds by suicide bombers.
The multibillion-dollar U.S. effort to defeat IEDs has featured drone spy planes, robotic vehicles, radio jammers, ground-penetrating radar, heavy armored vehicles and even blimps. That technology has helped to quell bomb attacks in Iraq, where insurgents use sophisticated devices often remotely detonated by garage door openers and cell phones - devices that can be electronically jammed.
But Afghan bomb-makers typically construct more primitive detonators of scrap wire and wooden sticks that are not affected by radar or radio jammers, leaving the U.S. military stuck with a lopsided, costly defense against maddeningly cheap attacks.
"We try to get ahead of them on the electromagnetic spectrum - and he goes back to a string and clothespin, a much more difficult problem to solve," Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, director of the Pentagon's counter-IED task force, complained recently at an Army forum. Metz's annual budget runs to $11 billion.
In an interview, Metz admitted frustration at being forced to build "million-dollar solutions to $100 problems. That's just isn't smart business," he fumed. "But it is saving lives."
Half of all known IEDs are discovered before they detonate. Still, bomb blasts have killed 24 of the 27 Americans who died in action so far this year in Afghanistan, more than twice the number for the corresponding period last year. Since the war began in late 2001, 201 American have been killed and 1,224 wounded in Afghanistan by IED blasts, according to Defense Department data through February 2009.
