Suicide bombing statistics from Afghanistan alarmingly demonstrate that, if the current trend continues, 2007 will surpass last year in the number of overall attacks. While there were 47 bombings by mid-June 2006, there have been approximately 57 during the same period this year. Compounding fears of worse carnage to come, Afghanistan's most lethal single suicide bombing attack to date recently took the lives of 35 Afghan police trainers near Kabul. When considering the expanding use of IEDs and the discovery of the first Iraqi-style Explosively Formed Projectile (EFP) in Afghanistan in May (i.e. a more deadly form of IED that has killed high numbers of soldiers in Iraq), it is understandable that critics of the war in Afghanistan discuss it in alarmist tones. Approximately 80% of U.S. casualties in Iraq come from IEDs, and members of the U.S. and Afghan military who were interviewed for this study believed that the absence of mass casualty suicide bombings and EFPs were the two factors that made Afghanistan less dangerous than Iraq. A deeper investigation of the wave of suicide bombings that have swept the country in 2006 and 2007 paints a less bleak picture....
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