U.S. death toll hits monthly high in Afghanistan

An American service member died in a bomb blast in Afghanistan on Friday, raising the monthly death toll to 45 and making August 2009 the deadliest month of the eight-year war for U.S. forces.

In total, US Defence Department figures show that 801 US service personnel have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. The pace of casualties is picking up - at least 300 coalition soldiers have lost their lives since the beginning of the year 2009, up from 294 in 2008.

Every time a young American soldier returns from Afghanistan in a body bag, Former President Bush and Vice President Cheney have to look at themselves in the mirror and answer one simple question: Why did they not finish the job in 2001 when the Taliban were on the run and there was no place for them to hide, not even in the mountains of Tora Bora.

Instead of going into Afghanistan with the overwhelming force that was the hallmark of American military strategy in the first Gulf war, Bush and Cheney relied on special forces and B-52s miles up in the air to drive the Taliban out of Kabul. Soon thereafter, most of the American military resources were hastily diverted to Iraq to fulfill some kind of neo-conservative agenda, leaving the war in Afghanistan to fester like an old wound due to lack of proper attention.

While the American military was bogged down in Iraq for several years, the Taliban found time to regroup, claim new territory in both Afghanistan (and across the border in Pakistan) and emerge as a deadlier and more formidable foe than it ever was before.

US President Obama’s administration has made the Afghanistan war a higher priority but the allocation of resources has not picked up sufficiently enough to make a meaningful difference. The war in Afghanistan can not be won through half measures and divided attention – ask Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the British commanding general in Afghanistan who last year conceded that "We're not going to win this war!"