Army Operations Chief: "The IED Problem Is Getting Out Of Control. We've Got To Stop The Bleeding."

By the late summer of 2002, as the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington approached, an American victory in Afghanistan appeared all but assured.

A pro-Western government had convened in Kabul. Reconstruction teams fanned out through the provinces. U.S. and coalition troops hunted Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants in the mountains along the Pakistani border...

...By late September 2003, Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army's operations chief, believed that IEDs not only threatened soldiers in Iraq, who included his two sons and a nephew, but also posed a strategic risk to U.S. ambitions in the region. "The IED problem is getting out of control," he told Col. Christopher P. Hughes, a staff officer. "We've got to stop the bleeding."

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