You may not get this sense from the doom and gloom media but the coalition deaths in Afghanistan are on pace to equal the number lost last year.
ICasualties.com
The last 6 months in Iraq saw the lowest number of fatalities in a 6 month stretch since the start of the war in 2003.
And, for the second month in a row the number of troops killed in Iraq was lower than the number of coalition troops lost in Afghanistan.
The AP, of course, reported this as if it were bad news:
Militants killed more U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan in June than in Iraq for the second straight month.
At least 45 international troops — including at least 27 U.S. forces and 13 British — died in Afghanistan in June, the deadliest month since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion to oust the Taliban, according to an Associated Press count…
In Iraq, at least 31 international soldiers died in June: 29 U.S. troops and one each from former Soviet republics Georgia and Azerbaijan. There are 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 4,000 British forces in addition to small contingents from several other nations.
The 40-nation international coalition is much broader in Afghanistan, where only about half of the 65,000 international troops are American.
That record number of international troops means that more soldiers are exposed to danger than ever before. But Taliban attacks are becoming increasingly complex and, in June, increasingly deadly.
The number US deaths in Iraq have plummeted since the the Bush surge was put into place in Iraq:
ICasualties.org
