Overnight a US Special Ops soldier was killed in a clash in Afghanistan. Earlier this week, of course, two two CIA "contractors" were killed while tracking Taliban elements.
On first face, this pair of successes suggests that Talibani forces are improving their insurgency/antireconnaissance tactics. On the other hand, the CIA doesn't publish the names of its dead very often, nor acknowledge their sacrifice in public. It may be that we've been losing men of this quality all along, or that the Taliban got two lucky breaks in a week.
It is something to watch, however, as prolonged conflicts do often result in an improvement of enemy forces' techniques as they learn the weaknesses of your own techniques and equipment. The classic example of this is that the militants in Israel, once cowed by IDF tanks, have learned to take them out. (Cf. with the mysterious destruction of a US M1A1 earlier this month--hat tip on that to the Agonist, who remains an excellent source of war news).
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