Whitehouse: Afghanistan death toll will rise

By HILARY RUSS
Associated Press Writer
Published: November 13, 2008

PROVIDENCE—U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who returned this week from a trip to Afghanistan, said Thursday that violence in that country is likely to get worse before it can get better.

Whitehouse, a Democrat who is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, returned this week from his first trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan for briefings from foreign officials and military leaders. Rhode Island’s junior senator spent three days visiting the countries with a congressional delegation led by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

Also Thursday, a car bomb killed a U.S. soldier, bringing the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year to at least 148 — the highest number since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

Whitehouse said the death toll is likely to escalate because American military leaders have already begun shifting attention away from a tapering war in Iraq to the unstable border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“The military over there expect that there will be higher casualties as they implement their strategy of pushing further up in to the hills, further up into the valleys, taking the fight aggressively to the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in areas that they were operating out of with impunity before hand,“ Whitehouse said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.

Insurgents, Whitehouse said, “will be making greater and greater efforts to try to disrupt that progress with terror attacks.“

Thursday’s attack on a U.S. convoy took place in a crowded market. Coalition forces are trying to take the fight to the field instead of urban centers crowded with large civilian populations, Whitehouse said.

U.S. military leaders have already begun shifting resources from Iraq to Afghanistan and boosting that nation’s troops, who Whitehouse said were eager to fight and were building relationships with their American counterparts.

“They’re not used to inhabiting a modern military structure, but as they adapt to it, and their native fighting skill coordinates with that, they’ve become proficient very quickly,“ Whitehouse said.

While Whitehouse met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, and other high-ranking American and foreign officials, he said one group of operatives — young, skilled, bearded Americans working in remote locations — left a lasting impression.

“There are Americans who are operating in very forward positions, doing very dangerous, classified missions, at an extraordinary level of professionalism. And meeting with these young men and hearing from them, they turned the tables on us and started asking us the questions,“ Whitehouse said.

“And the questions all were about how we could help make them more effective, give them more scope, give them more freedom of action, manage better the disadvantage that the Pakistani-Afghani border presents for us, for the Pakistanis and for the Afghanis who have to respect the sovereign border whereas the Taliban and the al-Qaeda pay no attention to it.“

Meeting the operatives, Whitehouse said, was the final “capstone that really convinced me that the American forces, both civilian and military over there, feel very proud and very positive about their mission.“