You CAN take it with you, but it's gonna be difficult
Main Hurdle in Afghan Withdrawal: Getting the Gear Out
By THOM SHANKER, NYT
WASHINGTON — As the military begins carrying out President Obama’s order to cut force levels in Afghanistan by half over the next year, getting 34,000 troops out is the easy part: just deliver them to an airfield, march them by the hundreds onto transport planes and fly them home.
But after 11-plus years of war, the accumulated American hardware in Afghanistan amounts to more than 600,000 pieces of equipment valued at $28 billion. In that arsenal are systems that always present challenges to international shipping, including MRAP mine-resistant troop transports and Stryker infantry fighting vehicles, each built with tons of armor, and heavy tractor-trailers and tankers.
So far, the heavy vehicles have all been shipped out by air because Afghanistan is landlocked, it has a primitive road system and the Taliban remain strong in many parts of the country. But the real problem to withdrawing from Afghanistan is the same one that has helped make fighting there so difficult: the tenuous relationship with neighboring Pakistan, which offers the cheapest land route to the closest seaport but through border crossings that are unreliable.
Logistics officers are only too mindful that Pakistan closed the routes after American airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at an outpost on the Afghan border in November 2011. The routes were reopened only last July after Washington apologized. But American officials hope that up to 60 percent of the hardware in Afghanistan can be sent out by way of Pakistan.
(More here.)
WASHINGTON — As the military begins carrying out President Obama’s order to cut force levels in Afghanistan by half over the next year, getting 34,000 troops out is the easy part: just deliver them to an airfield, march them by the hundreds onto transport planes and fly them home.
But after 11-plus years of war, the accumulated American hardware in Afghanistan amounts to more than 600,000 pieces of equipment valued at $28 billion. In that arsenal are systems that always present challenges to international shipping, including MRAP mine-resistant troop transports and Stryker infantry fighting vehicles, each built with tons of armor, and heavy tractor-trailers and tankers.
So far, the heavy vehicles have all been shipped out by air because Afghanistan is landlocked, it has a primitive road system and the Taliban remain strong in many parts of the country. But the real problem to withdrawing from Afghanistan is the same one that has helped make fighting there so difficult: the tenuous relationship with neighboring Pakistan, which offers the cheapest land route to the closest seaport but through border crossings that are unreliable.
Logistics officers are only too mindful that Pakistan closed the routes after American airstrikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at an outpost on the Afghan border in November 2011. The routes were reopened only last July after Washington apologized. But American officials hope that up to 60 percent of the hardware in Afghanistan can be sent out by way of Pakistan.
(More here.)
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