While Washington struggles to define just the right strategy for Afghanistan, insurgents there are quietly killing young Americans with terrible efficiency, and all of America's military might cannot stop them. Even as a senior U.S. officer was suggesting to me Tuesday that the Pentagon is on the verge of important technological break-throughs in its long war against roadside bombs, eight American troops were killed and several others were wounded by IED blasts in southern Afghanistan.

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The attacks bring this year's U.S. death toll from IEDs in Afghanistan to 384 so far, a grim new record (last year: 263). Those who survive IED blasts tend to be very badly wounded, and there are many of them: at least 21,000 from the Iraq war and more than 2,000 so far from Afghanistan.

This September, U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan suffered 322 casualties (killed and wounded) from IEDs, almost four times the 87 casualties of the previous September. The year before that, in September 2007, there were 46 casualties.

The dramatic upswing in dead and wounded came despite months of preparation for the "surge'' of troops authorized last spring by President Obama. The Pentagon deployed close to $1 billion worth of IED jammers, mine-clearing vehicles, heavy armored trucks and other gear as well as intelligence analysts and technical specialists to Afghanistan to blunt the expected wave of new IED attacks.

Yet the killing and maiming will likely go on and perhaps even get worse, whether Obama chooses to send in tens of thousands of troop reinforcements to Afghanistan, or even to scale back the U.S. military presence. For the Taliban, at least, the IED is a winning tactic. The enemy has figured out how to use homemade explosives and cheap, simple detonators to parry America's huge advantage in military manpower, technology and money. Early in the Afghan war, IEDs were causing about 10 percent of all American casualties. By 2007, half of U.S. battle casualties were caused by IEDs. Now, in some parts of Afghanistan, IED blasts cause 80 percent of American casualties.

"The IED is playing a larger and larger role in the enemy's effort,'' Lt. Gen. Tom Metz, the Pentagon's top IED hunter, said Tuesday.

More to the point, he said, the IED "is a weapon system the enemy has figured out has strategic impact.'' Its effect on the battlefield may be horrifying, not only for those it maims, but for the tens of thousands of troops who set out each day under the stress of knowing that an IED blast could come at any second. But for the Taliban, the more critical ("strategic'') target is the American public and politicians, whom the insurgents hope to convince that the cost in blood is simply too high to continue the war.

It is the mission of Metz's organization, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, to prevent that. JIEDDO is headquartered in a Virginia high-rise a mile south of the Pentagon, where it spends around $3.5 billion a year, much of it on high-tech sensors and jammers that proved effective in Iraq over the past several years. There, insurgents built IEDs from discarded military munitions, often powerful artillery shells, and devised ways to detonate them remotely using radio signals from cell phones or garage door openers. Eventually, the JIEDDO warriors figured out how to block these signals with jammers mounted on low-flying aircraft and most trucks, Humvees and the heavy armored trucks known as MRAPs.

But the jammers haven't worked well in Afghanistan, because Afghan insurgents rarely use radio signals. The IEDs I have seen there often have a "switch'' fashioned from two wooden sticks or hacksaw blades, fastened at one end, buried and wired underground to a small battery and a plastic bucket of fertilizer and diesel oil. When someone steps on the "switch,'' it closes and completes the electric circuit, detonating the charge. Also common: the "command wire,'' which leads from a buried bomb hundreds of yards away to where a hidden insurgent can watch for a passing American convoy. However they are detonated, the IEDs built by Afghan insurgents are powerful enough to hurl a 24-ton MRAP off the road.

U.S. casualties may rise under the counterinsurgency strategy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and allied commander in Afghanistan. McChrystal has directed that U.S. troops "spend as much time as possible with the people and as little time as possible in armored vehicles or behind the walls'' of fortified bases. The general himself often shrugs off his body armor and helmet when meeting with Afghans clothed only in robes and sandals.

But the insurgents have seen this as an opportunity and are now attacking dismounted troops with IEDs, Metz told a small group of journalists Tuesday. Increasingly, he said, "IEDs are targeted at dismounts ... because we are getting out of the vehicles.''

Bright spots in this dismal picture? There are a few. Metz said that JIEDDO technicians are completing work on a new type of remote sensor that can detect tiny disturbances in soil, indicating that a hole has been dug and refilled. Such a "change detection'' sensor is typically mounted on a manned or unmanned aircraft that can provide wide area coverage, "staring'' at an area over a long period of time. On-board computers are constantly comparing what the sensor "sees'' with what it has seen previously.

JIEDDO is also working to perfect sensors that can detect the fine filament of wire used to detonate IEDs. "I've got a lot of confidence we are closing in on being able to detect the command wire,'' Metz said. But he also acknowledged that the easy technical solutions have all been tried. "The low-hanging fruit has been harvested,'' he said. "We have only difficult technical challenges ahead of us.''

Also promising is the effort JIEDDO is mounting to probe into the broad networks of insurgents necessary to sustain an IED campaign: the financiers, the couriers who ferry explosives, the bomb-assembly technicians, and the lower-level workers who carry and bury the IEDs. Metz said JIEDDO is increasing its budget for basic social network research, and there is an extensive covert program in Afghanistan to penetrate IED networks.

But all this work omits the protection of the people whom McChrystal calls "the center of gravity'' of the war, the Afghans themselves. The $3.5 billion that JIEDDO spends each year is specifically directed, by law, toward the protection of American troops. Afghan civilians benefit, of course, if they happen to live in the vicinity of American forces that find and disarm IEDs.

Direct help will be a long time coming. The Pentagon "has not been good'' about sharing its technical secrets with allies, much less the Afghan government, Metz said. As for training Afghan security forces to detect IEDs, that's a way off, too. "We've got to take them through some very fundamental training'' first, Metz said. "We're not there yet.''


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