Last year, a record high of 725 Afghans were killed by IED blasts, the largest single cause of civilian war deaths, according to a new United Nations report.
Now, U.S. officers expect a 30 percent to 40 percent increase in IED attacks as the additional U.S. troops pour into Afghanistan and, under the Obama administration's new strategy, fan out across Taliban-dominated regions on rural secondary roads that are often unpaved and not regularly swept for IEDs.
The new strategy also calls for Americans to safeguard Afghan civilians, which will require the military to extend its counter-IED surveillance and protection over hundreds of villages and miles of rural lanes and paths where civilians are being targeted.
To help meet the demand, the Pentagon is dispatching several hundred additional IED experts to Afghanistan to serve as trainers, intelligence analysts, forensic experts and technical advisers, senior officials said.
Having to protect civilians as well "makes our job even more challenging - we can deal with it, but it is more challenging," said a senior officer involved in the counter-IED campaign in Afghanistan. The officer asked not to be named to protect his family.
"We are making a difference," he said in an interview. "But there's still too many people being killed and maimed by IEDs."
Afghanistan's primitive bombs are partly to blame because they are so easy to make and so difficult to detect, U.S. and allied IED experts said.
Often, rudimentary "pressure-plate" bombs are fashioned from two wooden sticks, a small coil spring and cast-off flashlight batteries buried in the road and wired through a detonator to one or more plastic buckets of fertilizer and diesel oil. The weight of a vehicle or even a passing pedestrian will push the two sticks together to close an electrical circuit, triggering an explosion.
IED experts in Afghanistan describe such devices as "victim-operated."
Insurgents are using greater amounts of homemade explosives to produce more lethal IED blasts, Dutch Maj. Gen. Mart de Kruif, commander of allied forces in southern Afghanistan, recently told Pentagon reporters, putting at risk even the most heavily armored U.S. vehicles.
To help protect troops, the Pentagon has spent $27.6 billion to purchase almost 16,000 heavily armored trucks called Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, at an average cost of $1.7 million each. Most of the vehicles have been used in Iraq but are too cumbersome for Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in the region, has said. The Pentagon is shopping for more nimble armored vehicles.
