The toll rises

Matthew Rosenberg has an article in The Wall Street Journal about the rise in military deaths in Afghanistan:

Afghan insurgents killed nine foreign soldiers— six of them Americans— on Saturday and Sunday, in one of the deadliest weekends in Afghanistan for the U.S. and its allies since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. The bloody opening to August came after the most lethal month for the coalition in the nearly eight-year Afghanistan campaign. In July, 75 foreign troops were killed, more than forty of them Americans.
U.S., Afghan and allied officials say the spike in deaths is the result of two colliding factors: a big infusion of U.S. soldiers and Marines, thousands of whom are now pressing deep into Taliban strongholds in the country's south; and a push by insurgents to violently intimidate as many ordinary Afghans as they can ahead of presidential elections scheduled for 20 August.
"The Taliban and other enemies of Afghanistan are fighting hard to maintain their access to the people," said Lieutenant Commander Christine Sidenstricker, a U.S. military spokeswoman. "We have a lot of operations that are disrupting their ability to control the local population and conduct narcotics operations," a major source of funding for the insurgency. More operations, she said, "unfortunately sometimes translates into an increase in casualties."
The number of U.S. soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan has more than doubled in the past year to 62,000; there are another 39,000 troops from North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. In July, U.S. and British forces launched offensives against the Taliban in Helmand, a southern province of deserts intersected by river valleys where the insurgents have long held sway and where a substantial portion of Afghanistan's opium crop is grown.
Fighting has persisted across many other parts of Afghanistan as well. Three of the weekend's deaths came Sunday in the country's east, when a roadside bomb planted by militants hit a U.S. convoy. The insurgents then ambushed the Americans, killing three, officials said. The U.S. military still had to inform the families of those slain, and there was no word on where precisely the incident took place. Three other U.S. soldiers were killed Saturday when their patrol was struck by a pair of roadside bombs in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said.
Combating roadside bombs has emerged as one of the major challenges facing the U.S. and its allies. Such attacks have spiked this year. Another two soldiers with NATO's International Security Assistance Force were killed by insurgents in Kandahar on Saturday, ISAF said. It provided few details. Both were Canadian. A French soldier was slain Saturday in a gun battle with insurgents in Kapisa province, north of Kabul.
Across the border in Pakistan, authorities charged Sufi Mohammed, the radical pro-Taliban cleric who negotiated a failed peace deal between the government and a militant faction in the Swat Valley, with aiding terrorism, sedition and conspiring against the government, police said, according to the Associated Press. The February peace deal effectively handed Swat, one hundred miles north of Islamabad, the capital, to the Taliban. That deal collapsed in late April when the militants pushed into neighboring districts, prompting a broad offensive from the Pakistani military, which now controls much of the valley. Mr. Mohammed was arrested in Peshawar, Pakistan, in July. The charges were lodged Sunday at a police station in Swat, and Mr. Mohammed will be presented in court in coming days, the AP said. There was no immediate comment from Mr. Mohammed's spokesman.

Rico says the Dread Pundit Bluto had already answered the question he was asking: as terrible as this rate of dead American soldiers is, how does it compare to other wars? Doesn't even hold a candle to Vietnam, let alone World War Two, just as Rico suspected: