Taliban making deadlier, high-tech IEDs

[Naveed Yaseen]

* Pentagon report says current mine detectors not sufficiently sensitive
* Plastics more prevalent in new anti-personnel IEDs

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: The Taliban have been making simpler, cheaper anti-personnel bombs made of hard-to-detect nonmetal components, increasing the number of lethal attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan, the Washington Times quoted a confidential military report as saying.

The shift in the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) away from larger anti-armour bombs has allowed the Taliban to produce more devices and hide them in more places as they strive to kill larger numbers of US forces in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province and other contested regions.

The new Taliban tactics are disclosed in a confidential report from the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation, portions of which were obtained by The Washington Times.

The change in production from metal-dominated explosives to devices made of plastic is making it more difficult for ground troops to detect the buried IEDs with portable mine-detectors, creating an “urgent need” inside the Pentagon for better detection devices, the report said.

The area around Now Zad, northwest of Kandahar, has experienced some of the most ferocious fighting for control of southern Afghanistan since the surge of 21,000 US troops began last spring. News reports and military bloggers say US Marines on patrol face a constant threat from hidden IEDs.

The report said, “Smaller, lighter, more quickly constructed and quite often triggered by a victim-operated switch [booby trap], these IEDs have been a significant factor in labelling Now Zad the most dangerous location with the highest US casualty rate in either the Afghan or Iraq theaters.”

The August 11 report, titled, “The Taliban’s Emerging IED TTPs in the Proving Grounds of Now Zad, Helmand Province,” was written by an analyst at US Central Command, which oversees troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan. TTPs is short for tactics, techniques and procedures.

A military official, who monitors Afghanistan and asked not to be named, said the Taliban were shifting to small IEDs for a number of reasons.

He said the Taliban is also thwarting detection by using long pull-cords rather than an electronic signal to ignite IEDs. This way, the bomb cannot be defeated by electronic countermeasures on vehicles and aircraft that jam the signal.

The Pentagon report said the current mine detector, the AN/PSS-12, is not sufficiently sensitive to pick up the scarce metal in anti-personnel IEDs. “There is an urgent need to identify new man-portable detection platforms to expand the ability of US troops to detect anti-personnel IED-mines,” the report concludes.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp...009_pg7_13