"If you ask me what I worry about at night, it is the fact that our supply chain is always under attack," said Gen. Duncan J. McNabb, commander of the U.S. military's Transportation Command, in testimony last week that focused on Afghanistan.
And as we ramp up forces in Afghanistan, this worry intensifies:
The U.S. military is seeking to expand its flow of ground cargo into Afghanistan by at least 50 percent, to more than 100 containers a day, to meet the needs of the initial increase of 17,000 troops this year ordered by President Obama last month, McNabb said. About 38,000 American troops are currently in Afghanistan, and U.S. commanders have asked to increase that number to as many as 60,000 to combat an intensifying Taliban insurgency.
Up to 90 percent of American military ground cargo, which consists of nonlethal supplies such as food, fuel, water and construction materials, currently flows through Pakistan, defense officials said. Those supplies enter Afghanistan primarily through Torkham gate at the Khyber Pass and Chaman gate farther south.
"You very clearly have an issue of flow through a small number of choke points that seem increasingly vulnerable," said Craig Mullaney, who served as an Army officer in Afghanistan before becoming a war adviser to the Obama campaign.
The map should indicate the problem clearly:
As you might expect, going to the west through Iran for a supply line isn't an option. And beyond the intermittently cooperative "stans" to the north, lies Putin's Russia. If you really believe Russia under Putin is a reliable supply line, I'm not sure what I can say. The Pakistan route, where "130 contract drivers have been killed trucking American supplies," is our most secure route, amazingly enough.
And it gets worse, when you consider that these supply lines are for non-lethal supplies:
Apart from the ground cargo, all lethal and sensitive U.S. military supplies, as well as all personnel, travel into Afghanistan by air. Such supplies include ammunition, weapons and vehicles with sensitive communications and other gear. Air cargo demands will increase significantly as fresh troops move into Afghanistan, according to McNabb. For example, when the Army's Stryker combat brigade heads to Afghanistan this summer, all of its vehicles will be flown into the country, he said. The military's mine-resistant armored vehicles are also flown in to avoid attacks, he said.
Not that HMMWVs and trucks aren't lethal in the hands of US troops, of course, but this requirement to fly lethal material in (through the air space of bordering coutnries) makes supplying the war effort in Afghansitan far more expensive than supplying a similar soldier in Iraq. All those liberal "good war" advocates who bemoaned the cost of the war in Iraq (without admitting that dollars saved lives--ours and the enemy's) are going to face quite the sticker shock over the price of fighting in Afghanistan with more US troops.
Ultimately, the problem of our supply line lies in Pakistan, in our strange Mobius War:
The reason we can't do much more is that while the frontier areas of Pakistan across from Afghanistan are our front line, that same border region is our rear area that we rely on for supplies. That's right, we shoot in the same direction our supplies come from.
I hope the Pentagon has considered the problem of having to pull an Anabasis to fight our way out:
Don't bet the supply lines for 40,000 or more American troops (and 30,000 NATO allies) on the rationality of a Pakistani government under pressure from their own people, foreign and domestic jihadis, America, and India. Our military planners might want to read up on the Anabasis.
And in the end, the issue of Iran's regime proves to a potential solution to yet another problem we have with Iran's current mullahs:
Now, our access to Afghanistan is from the north through the unstable "Stans" and back through an increasingly unfriendly Russia; or through Pakistan which we have to coddle to keep land-locked Afghanistan from being cut off from us.The administration can slap that little reset button all it wants. But it won't do any good in regard to the many interlocking problems we have in the region. I bet that they'll even find that "solving" the Palestinian problem first is completely irrelevant to the issues.
Open up a supply route through Iran to Afghanistan and suddenly we don't need to be quite so reliant on our Central Asian bases or so careful with a Pakistan that will not crack down on the Taliban who hide and organize inside Pakistan. We won't have to be so shy when it comes to hunting bin Laden there, either.
Sleepless nights aren't likely to lessen any time soon.
