Jason Lyall is the James Wright Chair in Transnational Studies and associate professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College; he also directs the Political Violence FieldLab at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth. In a recent research paper entitled “Bombing to Lose? Airpower, Civilian Casualties, and the Dynamics of Violence in Counterinsurgency Wars,” he analysed U.S. Air Force (USAF) data and open-source satellite imagery to detail nearly 23,000 air operations in Afghanistan (2006-2011). Satellite imagery was employed to identify the targets of these airstrikes. These air operations include airstrikes and “shows of force”—simulated bombing runs where no weapons are released Did bombing the Taliban work? His study finds that U.S. bombing airstrikes in Afghanistan are strongly associated with net increases in the mean number of post-strike Taliban insurgent attacks in targeted villages relative to comparison villages that were not bombed. In other words, bombing a village tended to produce an armed response subsequently from the Taliban, whereas not bombing a village didn’t. These increases in rebel attacks were found …