US Military Death toll in Afghanistan hits 2000
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, September 30, 2012
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4 comments
Via the BBC:
A checkpoint shooting in eastern Afghanistan has taken the US military’s death toll in the war past 2,000.
A US soldier and contractor were killed while three Afghan soldiers died and several were injured.
The new deaths occurred on Saturday in Wardak province.
[…]
The Pentagon named the dead American soldier as Sgt 1st Class Riley Stephens, of the First Battalion, Third Special Forces Group (Airborne), saying the 39-year-old had died "of wounds sustained from enemy small arms fire".
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Losing Afghanistan: Clerics now openly support the Taliban
It’s time to get out of there as soon as we can. We can’t westernize people who don’t want it. It’s similar to what happened in Iran when the Sha tried to make it more secular and more like the west – a majority wanted no part of it.
Thomas Friedman does a pretty good wrap-up of GOP foreign policy:
Romney’s still living in 1989
We are in a war (whatever you want to call it, we invaded a country). We have been there for more than a decade. We have lost 2,000 lives. Is this supposed to be shocking?
For comparison, in Vietnam, we lost more than 2,000 US Servicemen in each of six different years and in the 9 years (’65-’73) we actually had combat forces deployed (as opposed to “advisors”), we lost over 56,000.
War has costs. That is why entering into one (or extending it) shouldn’t be the “easy button” and should be expected to cause pain – both in terms of lives lost and damaged and financial costs that need to be paid (i.e., taxes).
@SKI: No, not shocking. Just a fact.