Defeating the IED makers in Afghanistan

NY Times:

The call came just after dinner: a pickup truck carrying Afghan national police officers had hit a buried bomb, and all five officers inside were dead.

When First Lt. James Brown and his team of bomb investigators arrived at the shredded remains of the truck, the grim significance of the attack became clear. One of the dead was a hard-charging commander who, more than any officer in this restive district of Logar Province, had helped fight a shadowy network of local bomb makers.

“If he wasn’t trying so hard, if he was taking bribes, taking naps, he’d be alive right now,” Lieutenant Brown said of the commander, Gul Alam.

This is the war in Afghanistan today, where death is measured less by the accuracy of bullets than by the cleverness of bombs. And though the Afghan insurgency’s improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, are less powerful or complex than those used in Iraq, they are becoming more common and sophisticated with each week, American military officers say.

This year, bomb attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan have spiked to an all-time high, with 465 in May alone, more than double the number in the same month two years before. At least 46 American troops have been killed by I.E.D.’s this year, putting 2009 on track to set a record in the eight-year war.

I.E.D.’s have been even more deadly for Afghan police officers and soldiers. At the current rate, I.E.D. attacks on Afghan forces could reach 6,000 this year, up from 81 in 2003, a American military official said. In early July alone, nine Afghan police officers were killed in two bomb attacks in Logar Province, south of Kabul.

With few paved roads, Afghanistan is even more fertile territory for I.E.D.’s. than Iraq, where hard pavement often forced insurgents to leave bombs in the open. Not so in Afghanistan, where it is relatively easy to bury a device in a dirt road and cover the tracks.

Even when I.E.D.’s do not wound or kill troops, the threat restricts and complicates the movements of coalition forces.

American convoys often must wait for bomb-detection teams that move at three miles per hour. Helicopters are limited, and most troops travel in mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles known as MRAPs which are lumbering and hard to maneuver. Though heavily armored MRAPs are effective in shielding soldiers from explosions, two turret gunners died recently when one flipped over after hitting I.E.D.’s.

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There is more.

The story does not indicate if the US is mapping the placement of IEDs. Doing so in Iraq made it easier to develop patters and find the networks responsible. It also allowed the routing of UAVs to discover the bombers planting IEDs and taking them out on the spot. To defeat this kind of attack your need the kind of force to space ratio that can force the bombers through check points where they can be discovered.