Lieutenant Colonel Scott Rawlinson, a spokesman for Special Operations Command Africa, told me that the initiative provides "emergency casualty evacuation support to small team engagements with partner nations throughout the Sahel," although official documents note that such actions have historically accounted for just 10% of monthly flight hours. .
In Poland, Italy and Spain, countries that had sent troops to Iraq and suffered battlefield casualties in support of the Bush administration, Mr. Hussein's capture was a joyous vindication.
In that event, A(H5N1) may claim its most significant casualties: political support and financial wherewithal for emerging programs to combat the permanent menace of pandemic influenza.
Data gathered by General Casey's own command, which showed a steady increase in weekly attacks and civilian casualties, lent support to the Defense Intelligence Agency assessment.
"One of the main reasons that despite heavy civilian casualties people support the Taliban is the presence of the foreign forces in the country," said Wahid Mujdah, an analyst in Kabul.
Already battered by mounting casualties, Western support for the war has been further dented by an Afghan presidential election in August, wildly rigged in favour of the incumbent, Hamid Karzai.
This disconnect, between the seriousness of protecting the population and avoiding civilian casualties yet supporting robust Special Forces raids, which often resulted in Afghan deaths, is a troubling use of COIN fundamentals.
In an accompanying piece, after saying that the archive seems to support casualty numbers assembled by groups like Iraq Body Count, which the Bush Administration derided as "producing inflated numbers," the Times notes, In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.
Quasi-experimental studies of changes in organisation and distances to casualty clinics could support the results and would be welcome.
On the day of the bombings, 194 casualties were seen at the hospital, of whom 27 were admitted; 7 casualties requiring ventilatory support were admitted to the ICU and the remainder to the trauma ward and HDU.
