Via a piece in Daily Kos looking at Afghanistan, there's this little tidbit from the CBC:
NATO soldiers fighting in Afghanistan face a higher risk of being killed than the U.S.-led international forces that invaded Iraq in 2003, a British statistician says.
Sheila Bird, the vice-president of Britain's Royal Statistical Society, said in the Sept. 9 issue of New Scientist magazine that she made the conclusion after analyzing casualty rates and the number of soldiers deployed on each mission.
Bird said the risk to the NATO forces fighting militants in Afghanistan — including more than 2,000 Canadian troops — is approaching the level faced by the then-Soviets, who abandoned their war there in 1989 after 10 years.
Five of the approximately 18,500 soldiers in the NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have been killed every week since May, she said.
Yow. I wonder how long it will take for this to penetrate into the American consciousness. We like to think of Afghanistan as "done," with just minor flare-ups, but I'm thinking that's not so much true.
Posted by Jason at September 10, 2006 09:44 AM