Bernhardt of Moon of Alabama has a good short post up today on the huge logistics challenge involved in keeping the US/NATO forces in Afghanistan supplied.
He’s commenting on this fascinating report in today’s WaPo on the security problems the truck-based supply route through Pakistan has faced for many months now. The WaPo reporters write, “Before the Taliban raid and border closure last week, an average of 600 to 800 tractor-trailers moved through [the Pakistan-Afghanistan border crossing at] Torkham a day, according to Afghan customs officials.” That flow of traffic has frequently been reduced considerably, or choked off completely by anti-US or pro-Taliban forces acting inside Pakistan.
On Monday, the Pakistani army received orders to “shoot to kill” those attacking US convoys. Yesterday (Tuesday) the traffic flow resumed a little. But still Customs officials said they expected only around 200 trucks to pass through that day.
Bernhardt has a very handy link to a “Request for Info” issued by the US Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) which is,
- conducting a market survey on industry capabilities and potential sources for inter-theater surface transportation of military cargo to/from various destinations in Afghanistan utilizing two possible options. The first option is to move cargo between Northern Europe and various destinations in Afghanistan through Caucus’ and Central Asia. The second option is to move cargo between CONUS and Afghanistan through Asia and Central Asia. In addition to the options above, the Government is also looking for other possible innovative routing and intermodal solutions which may include air transportation.
Do they look a little desperate there? “Looking for other possible innovative routing and intermodal solutions…”?
B has also very helpfully produced a rough map of what the “European” and “Asian” options for new supply lines might look like. The Asian option notably goes mainly through China before getting to Afghanistan through one or more of the other Stans.
(Check out Stratfor’s handy map of the two new links China is making to the rail network the Soviets built, back in the day, in all the Stans they controlled. China has also recently, as I noted here, won a contract with the Afghan government to, inter alia, build the country’s first-ever national north-south rail line, that will connect western China’s rail network with that of Pakistan, and through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.)
But China’s big new engineering projects in the region will come far too late to save the US/NATO troops trapped in Afghanistan at the end of extremely long and tortuous supply lines…
USTRANSCOM’s “Request for Info” seems based primarily on the US military’s desire not to be wholly dependent in Afghanistan on trans-Russian supply lines, and not to be dependent at all on the other, geographically very obvious route into Afghanistan, which would be to go in through Iran.
In Bernhardt’s post, he writes,
- A retreat from Iraq would relieve the U.S. from some costs. But to supply a soldier in Afghanistan might easily cost double or triple as much as supply for a soldier in Iraq. Has Obama thought about how he will finance that war?
I think his estimate of the relatively much higher cost of sustaining each soldier inside Afghanistan is quite correct. And this is a matter that the US Congress– holder of the war-making purse-strings, remember!– should take into full account, as well as the incoming President.
Meanwhile, as Don Bacon has documented so ably for us here, the political-strategic part of the war effort in Afghanistan has been going abysmally badly. It truly is time to look for an alternative to continued US dominance of the “stabilization” (or whatever) project there.
Time for the Security Council as a whole to consider a whole range of other, much less unilateralist, less “western”, and less heavily militarized approaches.
Bernhard’s argument is good. In effect he is saying that a “surge” in Afghanistan is impossible. Most of the troops would be diverted to protecting the supply lines.