Afghan blasts kill 8 more US soldiers

This time of year typically brings a decline in violence as insurgents regroup with cold weather approaching. Instead, the bloodiest days this month have shown both the range of threats faced by American soldiers and the persistent danger of the most basic weapons.

Soldiers have died in a lone outpost in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan nearly overrun by more than 100 insurgents firing rockets and grenades. They have been killed in gun battles and in crashing helicopters. And they died yesterday in Kandahar province in a dismayingly familiar way: by homemade bombs buried in the road.

The significance of yesterday’s violence was that it showed again an inability to protect against the type of explosives that killed the most Americans in Iraq and are killing the most here, too. This year has already surpassed any other in Afghanistan in US military deaths and the rising toll poses urgent problems for the Obama administration as it attempts to fashion a new war strategy. At least 54 US troops died in October, surpassing the previous high of 51 in August.

Amid growing public disenchantment for the war, top military commanders have said they need thousands of reinforcements to beat back the resurgent Taliban but President Obama has said he does not want to rush a decision to send more troops. His advisers have in recent weeks debated the way forward in Afghanistan while the military has conducted war games to test the effect of thousands of more troops. “I won’t risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary,’’ Obama told a military audience in Jacksonville, Fla., Monday. “And if it is necessary, we will back you up to the hilt.’’

The New York Times reported that Obama’s advisers are coalescing around a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers - an approach described as less than an all-out assault on the Taliban while still nurturing long-term stability.

And early today in Kabul, gunmen attacked a guest house used by United Nations staff, killing at least seven people including three UN staff members, officials told the Associated Press. A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility, saying it was meant as an assault on the upcoming presidential election.

The deadliest of yesterday’s two bombs, known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs, exploded in the Argandab district of Kandahar province. It blew up an eight-wheeled Army vehicle known as a Stryker. The early-morning blast killed seven soldiers and an interpreter and seriously wounded another soldier, US military officials said. The bombs often are made from readily available ingredients such as fertilizer and diesel fuel and have proven capable of destroying any vehicle US soldiers have.

The military, in a statement, described the attack as complex but Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a military spokesman, said “it was a single IED, obviously a large IED, that hit a single vehicle.’’ A burst of gunfire followed the bombing, and military aircraft fired rockets at suspected insurgents, killing at least one of them, he said. The eighth soldier died in a separate bomb blast, also in Kandahar province.

The bombings came just a day after 14 Americans, including 11 soldiers, died in two separate helicopter crashes in rural Afghanistan. Military officials said no enemy attack was involved in either crash, but the crashes were under investigation. One helicopter crashed in western Afghanistan after it took off from the scene of an antidrug raid and a firefight with the Taliban, while the other case involved two NATO helicopters that collided in flight in southern Afghanistan.

The city of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban in the mid-1990s, now is considered a key objective for the Islamist militia in their battle to regain power. What is left of the former Taliban government, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, “has been working to control Kandahar and its approaches for several years,’’ General Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, wrote in his war assessment earlier this year. “There are indications that their influence over the city and neighboring districts is significant.’’