Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Afghanistan now deadlier than Iraq ever was

h/t Brandon Friedman at VetVoice
When the Iraq War reached its deadliest peak during a 10-week period in April, May, and June of 2007, 308 coalition troops died. That was 1 out of every 575 troops on the ground at the time.* It was a terrible period in which even the most die-hard Bush supporters began to question the sense in continuing the occupation. By contrast, 105 coalition troops have died in Afghanistan during the past 10 weeks. But because there are only 52,700 troops in Afghanistan, this represents 1 out of every 502 troops on the ground.
Memo to Pentagon: What more evidence do you need that Afghanistan is looking like an emergency?

* = The surge reached its peak in early summer 2007 and there were at least 177,000 coalition troops present.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Afghanistan? I thought we won that war.

Kathy said...

We all thought that, Abi, and we might have if we had stuck around.