This is a rate of about 4.1 dead per 1,000 troops in the field with the first reduction from the 2009 surge, call it an average of 98,000 troops in the field this year), and it won't change that much by the end of the year.
Last year, we suffered 496 dead with all our surge forces in place (for about 100,000). This is a rate of about 5.0 dead per 1,000 troops.
Add these loss rate figures to the historic rate I calculated here:
2001: 96
2002: 3.8
2003: 4.3
2004: 3.3
2005: 5.2
2006: 4.2
2007: 4.7
2008: 5.1
2009: 6.9
2010: 5.0
2011: 4.1
We've made more progress than I anticipated. I assumed that we'd suffer a casualty rate in 2010 more in line with 2009 when we first started moving into enemy dominated territory. But our casualty rate actually went down. And this year, it went down even further, showing that our gains in the south really have knocked the enemy down. There are many reasons that our casualties went up in raw numbers starting in 2009, but none are because the enemy is defeating us.
I'll repeat that I can't get worked up over losing our surge forces. I'd have preferred the decline to be more gradual (to avoid looking like a retreat to our enemies), but I thought we had enough to win at 69,000. That's what we'll have at the end of summer 2012 when the latest surge recedes.
And I continue to be nervous about having even 69,000 troops in landlocked Afghanistan when neither Pakistan nor Russia are reliable partners for supplying our forces. I will sleep easier when we are down to 25,000 or so backing up a largely Afghan effort to keep al Qaeda and the Taliban from regrouping on Afghan territory.
We're doing all right in Afghanistan. I can't complain about our strategy there. Unless we just bug out completely before the job is done, we can achieve a victory in Afghanistan that leaves a nominal central government with regional governments strong enough to resist the Taliban and al Qaeda with our continued assistance.
UPDATE: Strategypage notes that we've been hammering the Taliban, which goes a long way toward understanding why our casualty rates didn't remain at the 2009 level or worse:
Largely unnoticed in the media, over a year of hard fighting by foreign troops in Afghanistan has done some serious damage to the drug gangs and their Taliban allies. While the drug gangs have the resources (enormous profits) to rebuild and bounce back, the Taliban do not. ...
The main reason Afghan violence is down 15 percent this year is because of the damage to the Taliban. Some 80 percent of civilian combat/terror deaths are the result of Taliban action. The same with casualties to Afghan security forces and foreign troops is Taliban related. Thus if you want to reduce violence, you have to reduce Taliban capabilities. The Taliban are betting on the withdrawal of foreign troops after 2014 to rescue them from this death spiral.
Just the fact that the enemy has decided that their best bet is to sit there and take our hammering until we leave should tell you that we are winning. That isn't clever strategy--it is desperate. You don't maintain morale in your forces by telling your lads that the big-brained strategy is to have some of them survive long enough to be able to fight someone other than the Americans and other Western troops. So just wait a few years and keep your head down!
As long as we don't just bug out (the way we are doing in Iraq right now), there is no reason that we can't leave Afghan forces good enough to defeat the Taliban still standing after 2014. As long as we keep a force that can support the Afghans if they get in trouble and make sure they have intel, air support, and logistics support, our surge will have done its job.
UPDATE: And yes, tip to Mad Minerva, Afghanistan is better off now than it was a decade ago, despite the violence--and even in terms of violence:
For all the waste, corruption, and death, Afghanistan is a much better place to live than it was 10 years ago, and the international community can take a considerable part of the credit for that.
First, the country remains considerably more peaceful and united than it has been for most of the past 40 years. The 1990s saw battle deaths in Afghanistan average around 9,000 a year, according to World Bank data. From 2003 to 2008, though, despite an uptick of violence in the last few years, that average was down to below 3,000 deaths.
And the international community needed our troops to enable those efforts. To recall what a noted COIN expert said on that issue, I don't know if military means are 50% or 10% of the struggle, compared with non-military means, but the military percent is the first part of the solution.
It is too easy to look at Afghanistan's many problems and forget that it was actually a lot worse before we arrived.
