1. For
Pakistani truckers, NATO route row is all
about the money
www.arabtimesonline.com/NewsDetails/tabid/96/smid/414/ArticleID/...
... NATO route row is ... deliver supplies to Western
forces in Afghanistan
seethe whenever they ... entrepreneurs of danger along the two routes ...
--------------
A
monumental task in Afghanistan
America’s pull-out is set to be complicated and expensive because of the
geography and its less-than-friendly ties with neighbouring countries
- By Amie Ferris-Rotman
- Published: 21:30 September 26, 2013
- Image Credit: NYT
- The retreat An American soldier leaves Strong Point Haji Rahmuddin
II after turning over the small base in Pashmul, Kandahar, to the Afghan
National Army
Image 1 of 3
At the sprawling Bush Market deep within Afghanistan’s capital, the
American war is for sale. The maze of about 500 interconnected stores, named
after the American president who invaded in 2001, is a chaotic emporium
brimming with goods carted in by truck to supply Nato troops. For more than a
decade, thousands of vehicles have crossed the border with Pakistan each month,
bringing food and supplies that are in turn pilfered, repurposed with price
tags, and put on display under the baking sun: Pop-Tarts, Maxwell House coffee
canisters, and squeeze bottles of maple syrup, alongside military fatigues,
body armour, night-vision goggles, GPS devices, and even some automatic rifles.
Since the end of 2011, when Nato forces began their retreat from the
Afghan war zone, turnover from stolen military gear has shot upwards, from
about $20,000 (Dh73,400) to $30,000 (Dh110,100) per month, market managers
estimate. One morning in March, Hafizullah Safi surveyed his black-market
empire from the corrugated-iron hut he calls his office. “The Americans won’t
be here forever,” the senior Bush Market manager told me. “But while they are,
they’re good for business.”
He clasped the white, wispy beard reaching to the middle of his chest as
he looked down on two Afghan traders who were dusting off military-issue Falcon
II radios to show to potential customers. Over several warm cans of Mountain
Dew, Safi said 70 per cent of his market’s goods are from trucks and containers
belonging to Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), most of
them American. “The more bases shut down,” said his young deputy, Ahmad, “the
more money we make.”
The spike in ISAF gear, though only a tiny fraction of Nato materiel in
the country, is a testament to the recent push to remove military equipment
from Afghanistan — the United States has some 100,000 containers and 50,000
vehicles in total — leading up to the December 31, 2014, deadline for all
foreign combat forces to leave. Estimated to cost $6 billion, the American
pull-out is a mammoth task — the largest, most complex withdrawal for the US
military since the Second World War — made all the more complicated by
Afghanistan’s landlocked geography and America’s less-than-friendly ties with
neighbouring countries. Not to mention that the withdrawal of equipment must be
timed with the withdrawal of forces, so that enough supplies remain to support
those still deployed.
The number of US troops, who make up the lion’s share of Nato-led forces
in Afghanistan, is slated to halve to 34,000 from present levels by February,
down from a peak of about 100,000 in 2011.
“From a service component, from a war-fighting perspective, from a green
[environmental] perspective, most of this has been worked out,” says US
Brigadier General Steven Shapiro, who until this summer was deputy commander
for the US Army unit tasked with removing materiel.
He spoke with me at the Kabul headquarters of the 1st Sustainment
Command, where the on-site mess hall buzzed with his team of camouflage-clad
logisticians. Most of them munched on precooked broccoli and green beans,
so-called “operational rations”, the latest additions to their diet now that
bases are cutting back on kitchen staff. These days, Shapiro’s command is
ripping down US bases across Afghanistan — about 100 Nato military
installations remain out of 800 in late 2011 — and sending the metal and unused
shipping containers to scrap yards, hoping to boost Afghanistan’s tiny steel market.
Troops have even started to “eat their way out”, he says, forgoing freshly
cooked meals for the remaining pile of MREs — high-calorie, vacuum-packed
Meals, Ready-to-Eat.
The work isn’t glamorous, but war logisticians such as Shapiro like to
conjure up grand visions of victory through their ability to tidy up after
battle. Contemplating the Afghanistan “retrograde”, the US military term for
the reverse flow of materiel out of war zones, more than one general quoted to
me the words of General Dwight Eisenhower: “You will not find it difficult to
prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily
because of logistics.” A seamlessly executed withdrawal, Shapiro says, is “all
part of winning”. But after the longest war in America’s history, the job won’t
be easy.
Compared with Afghanistan, withdrawals from previous US wars were more
manageable feats. That is true even of Vietnam, where almost 540,000 US troops
were stationed at the war’s peak in 1968. Over the next two years, when US
troop numbers dropped by 150,000 as part of a planned drawdown, the bulk of
their gear was shipped to the US base in Okinawa, Japan, before travelling back
home across the Pacific Ocean. Other equipment was housed in depots in the
safer parts of southern Vietnam — an option that volatile security makes
unthinkable here in Afghanistan.
The Iraq war retrograde, which logisticians feared could go awry, was
also pulled off with relative ease. From 2010 to 2011, about 120,000 containers
of equipment were driven across the border to US bases in Kuwait, where the
supplies could then sit safely for months, if not years, before making their
way home on ships.
The United States left behind tens of thousands of live-in trailers, but
little of military use. In December 2011, the final US troop convoy simply rode
across the border under the cover of darkness.
Afghanistan is a different story, given its hostile terrain, unforgiving
winters with temperatures that regularly drop well below freezing, and the
menace of being landlocked. The country’s well-worn reputation as the graveyard
of empires is not lost on today’s logisticians. The Taliban often point to
Britain’s catastrophic 1842 defeat in the First Anglo-Afghan War, when all but
a handful of Brits were massacred while retreating from Kabul.
Although Moscow’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was a mere road trip
through Soviet Central Asia, its exit almost a decade later, over the
Soviet-built “Friendship Bridge” connecting Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, was
harder to pull off.
Withdrawing troop convoys were regularly ambushed while snaking through
the Salang Tunnel, the sole passage through the Hindu Kush. The Soviets managed
to remove their helicopters and planes, but the decaying superpower left behind
as many as half of its armoured personnel carriers and tanks, which are still
strewn across Afghanistan, frozen in moments of abandonment by fleeing
soldiers. Just this past January, a construction crew hit on a Soviet tank that
was buried underneath ISAF’s headquarters in Kabul.
Today, some Nato equipment will intentionally be left behind in
Afghanistan as a “gift” for the 352,000-strong Afghan forces, which took charge
of the country’s security in June. This bequest primarily includes gear
desperately needed to detect and dismantle improvised explosive devices, as
well as some hardened vehicles, according to Lieutenant-General Nick Carter,
who stepped down as ISAF’s deputy commander in July to become the British
Army’s commander of land forces.
Empty shipping containers, battered vehicles, and the metal skeletons of
bases, meanwhile, are destined for local scrapyards. Unlike the Soviet forces,
however, the Americans will take home the bulk of their materiel, including
high-value equipment such as MRAPS (mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles —
the sand-coloured monstrosities that roam Kabul’s streets in trios) and
vehicle-mounted artillery used against the Taliban in places such as Kandahar.
At Bagram Airfield, an hour north of Kabul, scores of MRAPs sit parked in neat
rows, ready for their long journey home to bases and depots across the United
States.
For the most part, “Pakistan is the way out”, Shapiro says (just as it
has been used to ship in materiel during the war). The gear is conveyed
initially by truck — travelling about 1,600 kilometres overland from the major
bases in southern and eastern Afghanistan, through large, often dangerous
swaths of the Pakistani countryside — before reaching the gang-plagued,
multicultural metropolis of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. It is then loaded on to
cargo ships that set sail for the Saudi port of Jeddah and Egypt’s Port Said
before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the United States — nearly 13,360 kilometres
in total.
The trucking and shipping process is managed by US Transportation
Command (Transcom), the Defence Department arm that oversees air, land, and sea
transport for the military, and Transcom chief William Fraser makes routine
trips from his Illinois headquarters to check on the progress. I spoke with
Fraser, a burly, no-nonsense general, on the sprawling grounds of the military
section of Kabul’s international airport, where several C-5 Galaxy cargo
planes, their hulking grey bodies reflecting the sunlight, sat in a row beside
the runway.
He explained that on an average day, major global shipping firms, such
as Singapore-based APL and US logistics giant Supreme Group, submit bids to
move equipment from Afghanistan, via Karachi, to its final destination.
Once the US military agrees to a price, the contractor hires Pakistani
subcontractors — truckers and cleaners — to move the gear and prepare it for
voyage.
Relying so heavily on Pakistan has only worsened America’s logistical
headache. Oil tankers are frequently blown up by militants in the country,
while other trucks are attacked and robbed, with their cargo making its way to
black market vendors such as Safi. And agonisingly for the Americans, for seven
months starting in late 2011, the Pakistani route was closed, a setback that
still chills logisticians.
After a US air attack accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers along
the border with Afghanistan that November, Islamabad shut the supply lines,
abruptly halting all Nato-led convoys coming in and out of Afghanistan.
In July 2012, supply lines were reopened, and the following December,
Washington and Islamabad reached a final agreement that kept the routes open in
exchange for increased fees from the United States.
While the Nato supply lines were closed, several months’ worth of fuel,
food and weapons coming into theatre — Fraser estimates about 7,000 shipments
in Karachi alone — and military equipment heading out for retrograde piled up
at Pakistan’s main port and Torkham, one of the busiest border crossings into
Afghanistan. The blockage has only recently started to clear, Fraser says. The
first shipment of materiel to arrive on US shores after the border reopened, a
consignment of several containers and vehicles, didn’t reach its destination, Jacksonville,
Florida, until this past April. “Pre-closure in Pakistan, I want to say we were
looking at about 3,500 to 3,600 crossings [across the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border] a month,” he says. “And we are looking forward to getting back to that
level now.” He wouldn’t say where the figure now stands.
In conversations with logisticians, diplomats, and even Bush Market’s
black-market traders, the elephant in the room is always the increasingly
strained Washington-Islamabad relationship. Just hours before taking office in
June, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made a point of repeating his
demand for an end to US drone strikes, arguing that they undermine Islamabad’s
sovereignty.
The strikes have continued, but Pakistan’s proven ability to pull the
plug on Nato supply lines means America’s fickle ally has some leverage over
Washington. Several senior Afghan and Western officials in Kabul and Islamabad
told me Pakistan is demanding discounted US military gear in exchange for using
its territory. A US State Department official, speaking on condition of
anonymity, said such “fire sales” might become an option.
The US does have ways out of Afghanistan that avoid Pakistan. “We’re not
putting all our eggs in one basket,” Shapiro says.
But there is no question that the closure of the Pakistani route turned
the withdrawal from a complicated though manageable task into a full-blown
logistical nightmare. Using alternate shipping options, such as flying
equipment directly to the US or trucking it across the former Soviet countries
north of Afghanistan, ended up costing the Pentagon more than $100 million per
month, compared with $17 million to transit through Pakistan, according to the
Defence Department.
Pentagon requirements and a security situation in permanent flux mean
the amount of traffic on the alternate routes is constantly changing, with
Fraser and his team jumping across continents to find the cheapest itineraries.
Earlier this year, for instance, Transcom said the Northern Distribution
Network (see box) was carrying about 20 per cent of retrograde materiel;
according to the Pentagon, that figure had dropped to 4 per cent by midsummer.
Although US military officials won’t say how much of the retrograde is
complete, they insist it is on track. So far, several hundred bases, some
accommodating no more than 30 troops, have been transferred to the Afghans.
“We’re leaving fully functioning base camps for them,” Shapiro says. “It’s
their country, but the T-walls are still erected, the guard towers are still
erected, the generators still run.”
The mood in Kabul, meanwhile, is consumed by the withdrawal: The number
of foreign reporters is dwindling, the streets feel more dangerous, and
embassies are further fortifying their heavily barricaded compounds as fear of
the unknown reverberates throughout the city. At ISAF headquarters in central
Kabul, the drawdown is palpable. What was once a manicured, enclosed garden
where diplomats, generals and soldiers lunched at inviting picnic tables is now
a shabby, overgrown enclave with wobbly chairs and window frames in desperate
need of a paint job. There is an overwhelming sense of the end.
Back at Bush Market, the trader Safi, though disheartened that his
business will soon dry up, sees the retrograde as just another chapter in
Afghanistan’s entanglements with foreign powers. “I am Muslim,” he says
wistfully, cracking open another can of stolen Mountain Dew. “I believe in God,
not America.”
–Washington Post
Amie Ferris-Rotman, a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University,
was formerly Reuters’s senior correspondent in Kabul.
Box: Other ways to get back home
There are three exit strategies that bypass Pakistan. “Air direct”
allows Transcom to fly materiel directly out of Afghanistan to the US. Then
there is “multimodal”, which involves third-party countries and switching
between various land, air, and sea routes. Equipment-hauling US Air Force
planes are being refuelled at a base in Thailand, for example, and ships laden
with US materiel have set sail from the Romanian port of Constanta on the Black
Sea.
American gear is even being transported part way along the 120-year-old
Trans-Siberian Railway — whose leather-lined carriages take a week to trudge
through the Russian wilderness from Moscow to Vladivostok — before the gear
eventually makes its way to Washington state.
The third option is the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), which was
originally set up in 2009 to share with Pakistan the burden of supplying the
war and, according to the US, is one of the world’s longest military supply
lines.
With Russia’s longstanding wariness of Nato, the country does not allow
ISAF weapons to cross its territory. But nonlethal gear leaves Afghanistan via
former Soviet Central Asian countries and then moves either across the Caspian
Sea to southern Europe or through western Russia, where it travels along the
country’s vast and sophisticated railways, through Eastern Europe, and into the
Baltic states. A single piece of equipment might pass through ten countries in
total. In short, the retrograde is global.
6 Nov 2014 ... READ
MORE: Afghan police sell arms to Taliban 'to feed families' as wages go unpaid for ... “Possibly, some
of it has been stolen from us,” she said. ... Britain's 13yr stay in Afghanistan
ends as US, UK hand over military ba-----ses.
---------
7 Feb 2013 ... More than 40% of Britain's Afghan
military equipment may not return to the UK, ... Millions of pounds worth of resources are expected to be scrapped, sold
or ... The MoD has not disclosed
the quantity or value of equipment it ...
18 Dec 2013 ...
Military equipment worth millions of dollars goes missing each
year and the ... had lost the equivalent of
$10.8 billion during the Afghanistan campaign, ... UK, was found to have lost
8,312 pieces of equipment over just four ...
----------------------
24 Sep 2012 ...
Campaign: Mother-of-four Katy Bishop with her son Owen who has eye ...
rest of Britain, we may be losing around £13 million worth of equipment
every year. ... Now the stolen equipment
is turning up in Afghanistan and Iraq, ...
-----------------
1. Canadian Forces gear stuck in Kandahar for nearly 3 years ...
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-forces-gear-stuck-in-kandahar...
Hundreds of containers of military gear were
stranded in Kandahar
following the ... in Afghanistan;
Military gear
missing ... to lose
their seaworthiness ...
----------
24 Mar 2014 ... It has,
put simply, either been stolen outright by corrupt contractors or
allowed ... “For some reason when you are a
bureaucrat and you lose forty to fifty million dollars, ... army equipment
being sold for scrap in Afghanistan's flea markets to .... Like the British who
could not conceive of themselves without their ...
------------------
www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/19/us-
Jun 19, 2011 · ... about $17 billion of Iraqi oil
money it says was stolen after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and has
asked the United Nations ... The missing money was ...
www.zimbabwenews.net/story/204178846 Cached
Stolen NATO
army kits on sale in Pakistan! Zimbabwe News.Net Sunday 18th March, 2012.
Stockpiles of NATO military equipment meant for use against the
Taliban are ...
--------
1. US military leaves behind equipment worth $6 billion in ...
www.huewire.com/...military-leaves-behind-equipment...afghanistan/665
The U.S. military plans on
leaving a big part of that equipment
in Afghanistan.
The U.S. military
is leaving ... Moroccan Maniac may lose
French ... in Germany
...
1. Will Germany's Army Ever Be Ready
for Battle? - TIME
content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1906570,00.html
That question is especially urgent
in Afghanistan.
Germany
is the ... that Germany's
military
... Germany,
too many personnel and the equipment
is often ...
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