That said, I do think that we will see casualty figures go down this year if for no other reason than that troop numbers will decrease from 140,000 down to around 100,000.
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This has happened before (February a couple of years ago for instance) and can be attributed to a variety of things.
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No. February 2004 was a single month. Look closely at the sequence from October 2005, Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb, and now March. This is not a February 2004 down spike. This is a trend.