5% casualties in two days

[daleo]

Out of about 1000 troops, 5 have been killed and 39 wounded. That's nearly a 5% casualty rate in only two days.

[enigma000]

1. Only 5 of the wounded in the last attack were evacuated from the country

meanwhile CBC reports 200 Taliban killed.

[Spazito]

2. LOL, yes, it is easy to tout 200 "Taliban" killed when NATO stipulated

that anything and anyone moving in that area were legitimate targets whether it be an innocent Iraqi on a bicycle, an innocent Iraqi family in a vehicle or, indeed, the "enemy".

[enigma000]

3. I'm sure there were civilian dead and wounded

Reports on this will come out later. Still, this has been a large military encounter, and the Taliban don't seem to be doing to well.......

[Spazito]

5. I am not so sure the Taliban aren't doing so well....

they certainly seem to be holding their own with a much more technologically superior force. The Taliban/warlords are much more experienced at this fighting than are the NATO troops as they had 10 years of fighting the Russians for practice prior to this present situation.

[enigma000]

7. I suspect they keep getting reinforcements from Pakistan

And this won't be stopping anytime soon. It's like Vietnam: a 10 to 1 kill ratio, but the North Vietnamese kept coming. Perhaps once there is an actual functioning Afghan army, Afghan/NATO control of this region can be established.

[Spazito]

8. I suspect some of the "Taliban" are also Iraqis who do not like

foreigners on their soil and have joined the Taliban to force them out. Like Iraq, I think most of those fighting NATO are not foreigners themselves by Afghans.

[daleo]

4. This latest "friendly fire" incident makes one wonder about numbers

It has been noted that the Taliban seem to be exceptionally good at recovering bodies before western forces can get to the area where the enemy bodies are presumed to be. The other hypothesis, of course, is that these body counts are quite inflated. Imagine, for example, that the A-10 attack had been on Taliban instead of Canadian troops. Would 1 dead and 38 wounded have turned into an estimate of "at least 10 or 20 dead", based on the massive firepower that we know the A-10 possesses? Inflated body counts were the norm in Viet Nam, from my reading, and I see no reason this war wouldn't have the same tendency.

[Spazito]

6. That is certainly my suspicion as well, inflate the numbers of

"enemy" dead when some of your own have died so it doesn't seem as bad. I do not trust NATO's numbers and I do not trust the Taliban numbers either.