July is Deadliest Month for U.S. in Afghanistan

(CBS/AP)  Last updated 11:45 a.m. Eastern

NATO announced Friday that six more U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for July to at least 66 and surpassing the previous month's record as the deadliest for American forces in the nearly 9-year-old war.

In Kabul, police fired weapons into the air Friday to disperse a crowd of angry Afghans who shouted "death to America," hurled stones and set fire to two vehicles after an SUV, driven by U.S. contract employees, was involved in a traffic accident that killed four Afghans on the main airport road, according to the capital's criminal investigations chief, Abdul Ghaafar Sayedzada.

A statement issued by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said a vehicle carrying four U.S. contract workers was involved in a two-car accident near the airport.

"Our sympathies go out to the families of those Afghans injured or killed in this tragic accident," the embassy said.

Complete Coverage: Afghanistan

Witnesses said foreigners fled the scene, but the embassy said the contractors were cooperating with local Afghan security forces.

Afghan police, some carrying riot shields, converged on the area, firing warning shots into the air to disperse the protesters. Sayedzada said the crowd burned two foreigners' vehicles, causing heavy black smoke to rise from the scene.

"It is our right to raise up our voice and protest when innocent Afghans are harmed," said Azizullah, a 25-year-old student, who like many Afghans uses one name.

Ahmad Jawid, who also was at the scene, asked: "Are we not Muslims? Are we not from Afghanistan? Infidels are here and they are ruling us. Why?"

A fatal traffic accident caused by a U.S. military convoy in 2006 triggered an anti-American riot in Kabul that left at least 14 people dead and dozens injured.

A NATO statement Friday said one service member died following an insurgent attack and two others were killed in a roadside bombing the same day in southern Afghanistan. A U.S military official confirmed all three were American troops.

Earlier in the day, a U.S. military official confirmed three other American service members died in two separate blasts in southern Afghanistan on Thursday.

The six deaths raised the U.S. death toll for the month to at least 66, according to an Associated Press count. June had been the deadliest month for the U.S. with 60 deaths.

July's grim milestone was reached as U.S. military leaders issued angry warnings to the WikiLeaks website, saying the site's publication of more than 90,000 classified military documents put American and Afghan lives at risk.

U.S. and NATO commanders had warned casualties would rise as the international military force ramps up the war against the Taliban, especially in their southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar provinces. President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 reinforcements to Afghanistan last December in a bid to turn back a resurgent Taliban.

British and Afghan troops launched a new offensive Friday in the Sayedebad area of Helmand to try to deny insurgents a base from which to launch attacks in Nad Ali and Marjah, the British military announced. Coalition and Afghan troops have sought to solidify control of Marjah after overrunning the poppy-farming community five months ago.

The American deaths this month include Petty Officer 2nd Class Justin McNeley from Kingman, Arizona, and Petty Officer 3rd Class Jarod Newlove, 25, from the Seattle area. They went missing last Friday in Logar province south of Kabul, and the Taliban announced they were holding one of the sailors.

McNeley's body was recovered there Sunday and Newlove's body was pulled from a river Wednesday evening, Afghan officials said. The Taliban offered no explanation for Newlove's death, but Afghan officials speculated he died of wounds suffered when the two were ambushed by the Taliban.

Senior military officials in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the sailors were never assigned anywhere near where their bodies were found.

Newlove's father, Joseph Newlove, told KOMO-TV in Seattle he was baffled why his son had left the relative safety of Kabul. "He's never been out of that town. So why would he go out of that town? He wouldn't have," he said.

New York Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped in Logar in 2008 while trying to make contact with a Taliban commander. Rohde and an Afghan colleague escaped in June 2009 after seven months in captivity, most spent in Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.

Elsewhere, violence continued Friday.

Four Afghan civilians were killed and three were injured when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in Zabul province of southern Afghanistan, provincial spokesman Mohammed Jan Rasoolyar said. When police arrived at the scene, Taliban fighters opened fire. One insurgent was killed, the spokesman said.

In Kandahar, a candidate in September's parliamentary election escaped assassination Friday when a bomb planted on a motorcycle exploded, city security chief Fazil Ahmad Sherzad said. The Interior Ministry said a woman and a child were killed and another child was wounded.

In another sign that the Afghan war's end is nowhere in sight, Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations told CBS News on Thursday that President Obama's strategy in the neighboring country was doomed to failure.

"In my personal opinion, the way the war is being fought, it doesn't seem winnable," Abdullah Hussain Haroon told CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk.

Haroon said he believed insurgent attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan would decrease when U.S. and other Western troops pulled out of the Asian nations.

Those attacks, and "improvised explosive device" (IED) bomb strikes in particular, have increased dramatically in recent years. CBS News correspondent Mandy Clark reports that IEDs now account for about two thirds of U.S. fatalities in Afghanistan.

The trend is made startlingly apparent by a video posted on YouTube by an antiwar group. The video shows a map of Afghanistan and marks the location of IED strikes in a time-lapse from January 2004 to December 2009. The data used to produce the video was apparently taken from the WikiLeaks documents, which are mostly low-level intelligence field reports filed by U.S. service members.

[CliffyB]

The war is going exactly as Bush Cheney said it would. Iraq drew the interest of Al Qeda. A definite exit date has encouraged the Taliban. Troop morale is low due to ridiculous rules of engagement. Why wouldn't the Taliban be encouraged? They are getting everything they want from the White House and our soldiers are getting killed because of the decisions, and the lack there of, from the White House. This is not another Vietnam. It is more like another Mogadishu! It is really hard for a liberal leftist to pursue a war and win it for freedom loving people.

[GunsInTheSky]

I don't know which is more sad: This the highest death toll in nine years, or the fact we are still fighting and dying after NINE YEARS with no real progress being made.

[sciline]

Afghanistan is a collection of fragmented fragments. It is fragmented mentally, geographically, politically, socially, economically and religiously.
The citizenry will always be held mentally hostage by the very real threat of the Taliban, al queda, or whatever you choose to call our mutual enemy in Afghanistan, if they do not conform to their edicts.
An enemy who will always be ?out there somewhere? and always ready to return to exact their vengeance on any and all those who collaborated or sided with us. Vengeance that will be exacted as soon as we leave. Whenever we leave, be it next month or 50 years from next month!
What is the our ?Plan? for Afghanistan anyhow? What is our ?Goal?? We keep hearing that we are making progress in both areas? Neither area, however, has ever been adequately defined! Nor have we ever been given any examples of this much alluded-to progress in any area. All that has ever been stated with respect to a ?goal(?)?, is that we are trying to win ?the hearts and minds? of the Afghan people.
Someone once remarked: ?When you have them by the genitals, their hearts and minds will follow.?
In over nine(9) years and the loss of over 1,000 of our intrepid Troops, we have yet to find, yet alone come to grips with, the Afghan?s genitals. What is more, only the most deluded, would argue that we ever will. In my opinion, Afghanistan is a futile, no win, situation. We could spend another eight(9) or eighty(90) years there and never win any hearts and minds. Why? Because, metaphorically, Afghans never will have any genitals that we will be able to grab! Ergo, there will be nothing that can follow!
Whether we stay or whether we go, the enemy will continue to show up any time, in any place, with their inevitable lethal caches. They will show up on foot, on bikes, in cars, in trucks. They will be men, women or youths. They will be all matter of Afghans. They will be momentary and known to us only after they, with their lethal caches, or their IEDs explode in our faces or at our feet. They are ubiquitous and evanescent assault groups that attack and withdraw at will. Not to be found until they next attack at a place and time of their choosing. They will always be ?out there somewhere? and they will always return to attempt to kill us while we are there or to retaliate against those who helped us after we are gone. Whenever we go!
The Afghanistan army has been fending off invaders for 100s of years and to presume that we can teach them something about military tactics and security
is insane. They don?t want, need or appreciate our advice on anything. Particularly on how they should live!
The multiple-faced Maliki and his cabal only feign to take our advice only so long as our money, in large quantities, comes with it. Make no mistake about it, as soon as we are gone, Maliki wil revert to type. I.e., one who hates us and our ways as all his fellow Afghans do!
Tom Nass
5th Marine Division - WWII

[shierp]

The Taliban was the ruling party in Afghanistan. They were aiding and harboring the leaders of those who attacked us on 9/11 and killed nearly 3,000 people. We retaliated by destroying their military and toppling their government. We fought a war and overwhelmingly won that war in just one month. We kicked the ever lovin patootie out of them.
Since then we have been involved in an attempt to nation build and rehabilitate the Afghan nation. we are tying the hands of themilitary to minimize civilian casualties. The rebel opposition knows this and hides among and behind the civilian population, making our job harder and endangering the lives of our soldiers.
We have no business being there. Our mission was to destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. We whipped em in nothing flat. We owe this country and these people nothing. It is not our responsibility to rehab and rebuild this country. They started it and we finished it. We need to declare that we are no longer going to rehab conquered nations and get the hell out. We should announce to the world that we owe nothing to anyone and if anyone attacks us again we will stomp them and there will be no more Mr. Nice Guy afterward. We need to pick up our toys and go home.

[shierp]

Sing-with-rapture..

The complete and total truth. Our only weakness is our compassion. If we weren't concerned with civilian casualties, we could move through and kill every single thing that even approaches looking like a threat. There is no stopping our ability to destroy and kill. If they escape to the mountains, we either turn the mountains into an uninhabitable bombing and artillery practice rang or we sit and play poker until they pop their heads out of their holes and pop em. We could have bloody mangled burnt bodies piled everywhere of women and children and old folks. Make no mistake that we could murder millions and secure Afghanistan. But, we don't do that and shouldn't. So, we should leave because our enemies know our weakness is compassion.

[K. Daraa]

Shierp is right. At the battle of Mazar eSharif, a few American advisers on the ground with the Afghan Northern Alliance, guided in a series of concentrated B-52 air strikes against the amassed Taliban front line just opposite the Northern Alliance lines. The subsequent strikes obliterated the Taliban army in minutes.

We attacked Afghanistan in retaliation for 911 only. We destroyed most of the remaining Al-Qa'ida at the battle of the Shahikot Valley (Operation Anaconda) by March 2002, and we should've left right then.

We owe Afghanistan nothing. Nada. Let Al Qa'ida and the Taliban have Afghanistan, and for that matter all the rest of the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, the Trans Sahel, Sub-Saharan Africa, and especially, the Horn of Africa. The peoples of these regions deserve it. The Islamic Umma deserves Al Qa'ida and the Tafiris and the consequences of giving them their minds and hearts.

[pensacola8-2009]

These next 12 months are going to continue to create losses very similar to what we already see.

The Bush-Cheney decision to put Afghanistan on the back burner and pursue toppling Iraq, is what gave Afghanistan time to create strength and adapt. It will be recorded as one of the greatest American Military Blunders of all time. The Talibans are making every effort to re-create conditions of the late 1960's and early 1970's and exploit opportunities to make this a very political war.

Afghanistan is a great story about how an impoverished nation was bought by a wealthy man and converted into a state built on religious fundamentalist extremism. Taking citizens away from their beliefs won't be done without long term investment of infrastructure and competition for allegiance. Sustaining a nation-building effort will require long term commitment.

Yemen and Somalia are two other targets of nation-building in-progress.

The USA deficit will be expected to climb another 3 trillion over the next 5 years with war budget occupying the lion's share of the expenses. In 2015, we will be in debt 17 trillion dollars.

[biorep1]

I find it very interesting that the looney leftist activists are so absent on this. Where is Cindy Sheehan? Someone so much as scratched a finger while bush was press there was protests in the streets

[imthaid]

If we brought all of the troops home the unemployment rate would SKYROCKET. Unemployed troops, unemployed contractors, unemployed defense weapon suppliers. Obama can't have that. surely we can overlook a few dead troops?

[liberalme]

Put uniforms on all the illegals, if they want to be Americans so bad, let them earn it like an American!

[Myopinion046]

Condolences to all concerned (Matt. 8:5-13).

[Quantrill13]

Oh yes, how soon we forgot when the lame stream media called that "other war" President Bush's War. Now, you don't here a peep out of the liberal media calling this war, "Obama's War!"

[GunsInTheSky]

by Brokennews July 30, 2010 11:22 AM EDT
You know, evil comes in many forms, be it a man-eating cow or Joseph Stalin. But you can't let the package hide the pudding. Evil is just plain bad. You don't cotton to it. You gotta smack it on the nose with the rolled up newspaper of goodness. Bad Taliban! Bad Taliban!

-----------------------

If it just that easy the "evil-doers" of the "axis of evil" would've been stopped long ago with all our "shock and awe".

And while your post was kinda cute, these are real american lives that were lost. Please keep that in mind.