BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN — I.E.D. or Improvised Explosive Device: The U.S. military calls it the Taliban’s weapon of choice and one look at the statistics and you know why.

Components for the construction of improvised explosive devices found by Afghan Border Police and Coalition Forces in Khowst Province.

The crude but lethal weapon is responsible for more than three quarters of all casualties in Afghanistan, says the U.S. Army, and I.E.D. attacks have tripled so far this year compared to last.

“It is a fact of modern warfare, this is the type of asymmetric attack they will use against us … and we have to be prepared to deal with that and this is a fight that’s worth fighting,” says Colonel Jeffrey Jarkowsky, Task Force Commander of JTF Paladin, a multi-disciplinary team trying to combat the most likely killer of coalition forces in Afghanistan.

And while armoured vehicles and constant training does save lives, intelligence plays a key role.

“It is critical, intelligence drives the fight overall in every aspect and for us it’s critical to use intelligence to determine who are the cells and the networks who are implacing the I.E.D.s,” says Colonel Jarkowsky.

With I.E.D. attacks literally everyday in Afghanistan now, the Taliban is adapting and learning. Like a virus mutating, the Taliban is learning from mistakes and adapting with new techniques.

“And so you’ve got this constant, constant, battle for wits really, it’s a battle for wits, it’s not a battle about armies or mass or weapons, it’s a battle about clever-nous” says Paul Cornish, a military analyst with London-based Chatham House. He adds that coalition forces know they must be smarter and more agile than the Taliban.

“The coalition are using more and more advanced technology, equipment and assets and so on and we’re beginning to see unmanned aerial vehicles being used in missiles attacks on very very local targets” says Cornish.

But I.E.D.s of all types kill more Afghan civilians than soldiers. In a security camera video released to the media by the Coalition forces, a 4×4 truck is seen navigating a check-point in Khost province. To the left of the truck, there is a steady stream of school children returning home from their last day of school. The video shows the 4×4 explode into a ball of fire. Fourteen children died in the explosion and scores were injured.

Back on base at Bagram, the trainer is yelling out orders: “Don’t pick anything up!” “Get on your knees to check the vehicle!” “Anything obvious could be a decoy!”. The soldiers know the drill already but the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25Th Infantry Division from Alaska, is getting a refresher course. They are retracing the grim monotony of how to find I.E.D.s and dodge them, a task that has gone from Iraq to the battlefields of Afghanistan.

Here too now, as in Iraq, the hunt is on to find that that crude but effective weapon of war soldiers know all too well.

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LONDON, England — Wednesday saw no dramatic developments in the investigation but instead witnessed a steady drip of reports and information about what happened and how.

Up to twenty people were arrested but none of the gunmen responsible for the attack were apparently among them. 

Many have commented on the apparent ease with which the gunmen melted away into the city after the attack, and suggested this points to them receiving assistance from rogue elements within the military or the intelligence structure. While there may or may not have been collaboration of this kind, it’s a mistake to make this assumption on this piece of evidence alone.

It’s easy, for instance, to forget that the men who tried to bomb London on July 21st, 2005 were also able to make good their escape and hide undetected for days. Some of those men, remember, were escaping, unarmed, from busy underground railway stations. It was six days before the Met police had the first would-be bomber under arrest, and detectives in London had all the benefits of the city’s massive CCTV infrastructure at their disposal. Lahore, it seems safe to suggest, and notwithstanding the new video out Wednesday evening, is not quite so well endowed with surveillance cameras.

What’s more interesting is the number of reports now suggesting that the gunmen were carrying far more arms and ammunition than would be needed to execute an ambush only. Add to that the multiple reports they were also carrying dried fruit, nuts and water bottles in their rucksacks, and it does seem to point towards the possibility they had intended taking the Sri Lankan cricket team hostage. This possible scenario, of course, provides further similarities with the Mumbai attack three months ago.

Perhaps predictably, there have been growing voices blaming India for Tuesday’s attack. Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, has described it as “all too obviously the handiwork of Indian intelligence.” Meanwhile, Pakistan’s serving Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, has said he does not “rule out a foreign hand.” Foreign hand is code for India, of course.

It’s not surprising that Pakistan’s government might wish to point the finger abroad. At home and around the world, it has been slammed over this security failure. Whether or not individual police officers did their duty on the day – and one can understand why suggestions they did not have hurt when six police were killed in the attack – it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that the ruling party’s squabble with its political rivals might also have played a part in the failure. 

Last month saw the dismissal of the provincial government in Punjab – of which Lahore is the capital – run by the party of Nawaz Sharif, the main nationwide opposition figure to President Asif Ali Zardari. Along with the outgoing administration, the most senior figures in the province’s police force were also removed from their jobs. Faced, then, with a major security challenge – policing an international cricket match – it seems some of the main men responsible were still getting their feet under their new desks.