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US marks 2000 deaths as 'insider' killings soar
New York Times - August 23, 2012
Instead, Buckley became the 1990th US service member to die in the war. On August 10, he and two other marines were shot inside their base in Helmand province by a man who appears to have been a member of the Afghan forces they were training.
In the past week the US military reached 2000 dead in the nearly 11-year conflict. The calculation – based on Department of Defence records – includes deaths not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and other nations where US forces are directly involved in aiding the war.
It took nearly nine years for the first 1000 to die in the war. The second 1000 came just 27 months later, a testament to the intensity of fighting prompted by the surge – President Barack Obama's decision to send 33,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2010.
Throughout the war, summer has been the peak season for fighting, with the single highest period for US deaths being July, August and September 2010, when at least 143 troops died.
But this year, a new threat emerged: attacks by Afghans dressed in the uniforms of Afghan security forces. For the year to date, at least 39 non-Afghan troops have been killed in such insider attacks, most of them American.
Those attacks have increased concerns about NATO's ability to turn security operations over to Afghan forces by 2014, the deadline set by President Obama for withdrawing the remaining US forces.
Mark Moyar, an independent national security analyst who has studied the operation of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, said that the British who had preceded the marines in Sangin, a district in Helmand, focused on economic development and political outreach to undermine the insurgency. But the Taliban also operated with near impunity in parts of the district, he said.
The battalion took a different approach, pushing into Taliban-dominated villages and expanding the security bubble beyond combat outposts and Afghan commercial centres. Fighting was intense and casualties piled up fast.
The Pentagon asserts that most of the attacks by men who appeared to be Afghan security force members have been the result of personal grudges, disputing Taliban claims to have widely infiltrated the Afghan security forces.
But the attacks have also raised anew concerns about the integrity of the Afghan forces that NATO expects to secure the entire nation after NATO troops withdraw in 2014.
More fundamentally, the continued deaths, occurring even as US forces are conducting fewer combat missions, have prompted service members and military families alike to wonder: has the decade-long US presence in Afghanistan made a difference?
Colonel Jason Morris, the former commander of the 3rd Battalion, has little doubt that it has. After months of fierce fighting, he saw clear changes when he left Sangin in early 2011. Those improvements remain, he asserts, with residents participating in elections and going to school with less fear of Taliban intimidation.
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