General reports progress against roadside bombs in Afghanistan

Army Maj. Gen. James Terry, the senior commander in southern Afghanistan, told National Journal that U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan are finding and safely clearing 80 percent of the roadside bombs being set by militants there, cutting down on American casualties in one of the country's most violent regions and offering a potential bit of good news as the Obama administration prepares to start bringing home some troops later this year.

Terry said that U.S.-led forces had achieved a "real disruption of the lethal insurgent networks" responsible for thousands of American, coalition, and Afghan deaths throughout Kandahar in recent years. He said that coalition conventional and Special Operations forces had killed or captured significant leaders of insurgent groups, pushed into former insurgent strongholds near Kandahar City, and found increasing numbers of militant weapons caches. Since November, when Terry took command of Regional Command-South, coalition forces have found 60,000 pounds of homemade explosives, the core ingredient in roadside bombs.

"Progress has been made," Terry said in an interview. "It is fragile and it is not to the point that it cannot be reversed. But it's real."

A senior military official in Terry's command said in an interview that for the first time since at least 2007, the amount of what the military considers "positive" incidents (like when roadside bombs are cleared before they can cause casualties) outnumbered the amount of "negative" ones (like successful militant attacks on American or coalition forces). The number of positive incidents was three times higher than it was a year earlier, the official said.

The overall level of violence in the south was roughly consistent with prior years, the official added, when there were far fewer coalition troops in southern Afghanistan. But when it comes to the relative level of violence, the official said, "the numbers are clearly down."

Roadside bombs -- "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs, in military parlance -- are the top killer of coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, as they are elsewhere in the country. The official said that between October and December, 70 percent of the IEDs in the south were found and cleared; over the last month, the rate has increased to 80 percent. U.S. officials attribute the shift to a greater Afghan willingness to cooperate with the United States and take a risk by siding against the insurgency because there are substantially more coalition and Afghan troops in the area than a year ago, before the Obama administration began surging 30,000 American reinforcements into the country.

Still, Terry cautioned that the fighting in the south was very far from over ahead of the U.S. administration's self-imposed deadline to begin withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan this summer. He said the Taliban and other militants were setting ever more complex combinations of improvised bombs, including hiding explosives in the doorways and walls of individual houses, as well as inside the walls ringing them. Terry said his forces have found single structures with 11 bombs hidden throughout the building, often to protect large stores of homemade explosives elsewhere in the structure.

"It doesn't start at the door," Terry said. "It starts at the approaches to the structure."

So the United States has been expanding its use of a controversial tactic of using military aircraft to destroy scores of structures from the air. In a particularly striking example of that effort, an American-led unit used A-10 and B-1 aircraft to drop nearly 25 tons onto the deserted southern Afghan village of Tarok Kolache in October, effectively wiping the Taliban stronghold off the map.

The destruction of the village has sparked a heated debate within military circles, with some current and retired officers arguing it was at odds with the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, which calls for winning the hearts and minds of local villagers. Other officers -- including those who had been in command of the unit at the time of the strikes -- said U.S. forces had taken careful steps to ensure there were no Afghan civilians in the village and coordinated the strikes with local elders. The United States has begun rebuilding the town.

Terry wasn't in command at the time of the destruction of Tarok Kolache but said it was an appropriate use of American air power. He also said it was a tactic the U.S.-led coalition would continue to use in cases where structures had been verified as being free of Afghan civilians and were so extensively booby-trapped that the buildings couldn't be safely cleared by American or Afghan troops.

"The reality is that these structures are not inhabitable," Terry said. "And the reality is that you will get a lot of [Afghan National Security Forces] and coalition personnel severely injured trying to clear them."