If the insurgency was so popular, I would think that the price would be going down, not up.Possibly. But there are several other factors that could cause this kind of "price rise."
First of all, it's known that the roadside bombs are now much more sophisticated than they were at first - by necessity, since we've gotten much better at detecting and disabling them. The increasing sophistication (and power?) of the bomb itself has to cost somebody something.
Secondly, if they have to employ more jihadis to run cover for the operation (possibly because the better-trained ones - likely either ex-army or trained in Afganistan - have been depleted, or simply because we've become more efficient at dealing with them), that's going to cost something as well - even if you're just paying for their food, shelter, & equipment.
Thirdly, they have been making an effort to increase the number of such attacks as well - and apparently in the face of having their numbers depleted by US forces. This means more cost to replace the losses (training, recruitment, etc), plus enough more to handle the extra "workload." Inevitably the tendency would be to try to involve the common criminal element as mercenaries if they want more than what they can do with their regular forces. But the common criminal isn't primarily motivated by ideology or religion, he's motivated by money - preferably easy money. And we've made things much more dangerous for the bombers, so it's no longer a safe way to get some easy pocket money. So any operations that were "subcontracted" to such individuals would see their prices soar. However the fact that they might feel compelled to employ such people would not be a good sign - not only are such individuals unreliable, it would mean that their recruiting was not able to keep pace with their losses and/or ambitions.
As for "not news" - well, if this was already "well known" amongst the reporters, it might not be news to them even if it would be news to most other people. Or it might be known to reporters "in the field" that this isn't true and therefore the Pentagon spokesperson is wrong - but in that case why not dispute the story on the facts? Of course that's part of what reporters are being paid to do - find out and inform others of things they didn't know before. If one of those is the case it just shows that they're out of touch (we have other evidence of that).
The other way in which it might be "not news" is that Richard Miniter is "just another reporter" who's talking about things he's heard so it's second or third hand information. For something like this you'd really need primary sources since anybody can speculate on anything (including the individual at the Pentagon). However in that case it would seem that this was interesting enough to be worth investigating further; the reporter might not have had much to comment about at that moment but surely it would have been worthwhile to take a few notes.
But I'd have to agree, the reporter most likely either has an agenda that this doesn't "fit" into, or is so ignorant of economics that he or she can't draw the obvious conclusions. Based on my interactions with reporters, both of these might very well be true simultaneously.
No media bias? More of that mentality and less and less dependency on newspaper, radio, TV and magazine sources for our news. Those in the know - know not to trust those sources. The internet trounces them and they know it! It's sour grapes on their behalf. No one likes to see/hear/read losers whining...(smiling). When he says It's not news," he makes an assumption and we all know that they say about people who make assumptions..
