Good News? Good Luck!

Charles often mentions the 'fact' that the mainstream media don't report enough positive stories from the WOT (or whatever it's called this month). It's hard to see how any news agency can do this when faced with facts like this.

KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 21 - This year is already the deadliest for American soldiers in Afghanistan since the war of 2001, and the violence is likely to intensify before the nation's legislative elections on Sept. 18.

Four soldiers were killed Sunday, meaning that 13 have been killed in August alone. Sixty-five Americans have been killed this year.

The latest four were killed when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle in the south. Three others were wounded in that bombing, the American military said. And two United States Embassy employees were wounded when their convoy was hit by an explosion close to Kabul, the capital, the military said.

While some fighters want to disrupt the elections, one Afghan general said others are coming in to help the ousted Taliban or Al Qaeda with the long-term aim of dislodging American troops from Afghanistan.

"The fact that fighters come across the border, that cannot be denied," the Afghan defense minister, Gen. Abdur Rahim Wardak, said in a recent interview. "There are more people crossing on mountain trails" connected to Pakistan, he said. Most of those coming in are described as Afghans, but others are said to be Pakistanis. General Wardak said the Taliban were saying they had acquired new antiaircraft missiles.

A senior security official said Al Qaeda was paying renewed attention to the country this year.

More money is coming in, probably from Arab countries, and a unit of Qaeda fighters has returned to the region from Iraq to teach local fighters an unspecified "new tactic they learned in Iraq," one security official said, explaining that he could not be identified because of the clandestine nature of his work.

While election workers and candidates have been attacked, the violence has spread wider, with the killings of more than six clerics and tribal elders since May. On Sunday, a cleric and another man were killed outside a district mosque, the latest of several attacks on pro-government clergy in which Taliban insurgents are suspected.

More than 40 Afghan National Army soldiers have been killed in combat since March, the defense minister said. And more than 50 policemen were killed in June and July, Interior Ministry figures show.

A total of 181 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan since military operations began in October 2001, more than 100 of them in attacks. One of the worst attacks took place in June, when 19 Americans died in the ambush of a Navy Seal team and the downing of a helicopter.

Foreign fighters from Pakistan and Central Asian states, and even from the Middle East and North Africa, have also been coming in, General Wardak said. "Dozens have been captured in the last two to three months," he said.