Whatâs
Wrong Today:
We are leaving Afghanistan in 2014.
The costs and complexity of that task is now becoming clear. We will spend more
than $6 billion to pull out, says UKâs The Guardian:
expensive, but so is winding them down. As the US prepares to ship most of its
weapons, vehicles and other equipment home after more than a decade in Afghanistan, the bill for the
move will be a staggering $6bn, officers in charge of the complex process say.
Some
estimates are higher. The job is to salvage and reuse as much of the $26
billion of equipment on the ground that we can, particularly in this time of
budget deficits. The US military says it plans to level any bases not handed
over to Afghan forces and fly out, drive out or scrap the weapons, equipment
and tens of thousands of Humvees and expensive MRAPs (mine-resistant
ambush-protected vehicles) it has shipped in since 2001.
The
plan is to ship out as much equipment as possible by while making sure the nearly
70,000 US soldiers still in Afghanistan are not left short of the equipment
they still need. By August, the equipment exodus will be in full swing, with US
sending about 1,500 military vehicles and 1,000 containers per month out of Afghanistan.
About
two-thirds of that cargo is expected to move through Pakistan. In July, Pakistan re-opened its
highways to NATO supply trucks after the routes had been closed for
several months in response to the US killing 24 Pakistani soldiers in an attack
on a border post in November, 2011.
When
the US left Iraq, equipment was trucked to Kuwait where it was cleaned, packed and shipped out. But Afghanistan has no coastline, no stable, US-friendly
neighbors and a vulnerable road network, making the job more dangerous, expensive
and complicated. Colonel Mark Paget of the 401st Army Field Support
Brigade: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
than Iraq…You don’t have the space to make big mistakes. I can’t have a pile
of equipment building up. You need a
steady, even flow through the system.
The
Wall Street Journal reported that the US tested the Pakistan
overland route used for the past decade to bring goods into Afghanistan in
reverse, by sending a trial load of military hardware through Pakistan and on to
the port of Karachi. The shipment, which included more than 70 containers and
20 military vehicles, was a early test of the plan to bring home our military
gear via Pakistan.
But,
as Jim White reported at Empty Wheel, although the first shipment of 20 trucks made it
through, we now know that subsequently, a convoy of
five trucks on the exit route was attacked and destroyed.
From
the AFP via the
Express Tribune:
carrying NATO equipment out of Afghanistan were set ablaze by gunmen near
Quetta on Monday, as the international military alliance winds down its combat
mission there, officials said. Four masked gunmen on two motorbikes opened fire
at the vehicles, forcing them to stop and then doused them in petrol to set
them on fire.
The vehicles and their contents were a total loss. Looks
like the Taliban will have no problem stopping the steady, even flow of goods
that Colonel Paget says is critical. Nothing
can pile up equipment like a low cost, low tech attack. We will have to do a
better job protecting these convoys, or else use the more expensive alternatives of
air freight or the Northern Distribution Network, (NDN) a route through
Central Asia to the Baltic and Black Sea ports. The NDN may be more expensive
than the route through Pakistan, but it isnât exposed to attacks by the Taliban.
Perhaps
the military will allow a certain number of the convoys to be
burned by militants in Pakistan as a cost of doing business. Perhaps the
military will respond by hardening the convoys with troops, Humvees and MRAPS
like those they are trying to send home. Or, perhaps they would just be happier
ordering new stuff rather than using refurbished old stuff.
The
moral of the story: Itâs clearly easier to get in than to get out of
Afghanistan.
Moral
#2: Apparently, the Taliban can drink the Pentagonâs milkshake whenever they want.
