Killing the IED teams

Strategy Page:

In Afghanistan, many of the successful counter-terror techniques developed in Iraq, are being imported and used. One of the more useful tactics is to analyze the patterns of roadside bomb placement, then predict where the bomb placement teams were likely to operate next, and put UAVs or balloon mounted cameras up, to watch the roads likely to have bombs placed. When a team is spotted, a UAV fires a Hellfire missile and kills them. If ground forces are in place, it's sometimes possible to capture and interrogate the team. In one week long effort last year, six of these teams were killed, including one containing Pakistani Taliban trainers. With the trainers gone, roadside bomb attacks in the area declined 50 percent for weeks after.

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The data driven intelligence becomes more effective as it continues to collect information on the teams and their routes. In the coming weeks these IED attacks will become less and less effective. Because of the nature of the news business, we may not become aware of the defeat for awhile, because the media tends to focus on the enemy's success and not its daily failures. It is another example of the problem with using attacks as a metric of how the war is going.