New US military facilities being built in Afghanistan anticipate a prolonged occupation

Just Foreign Policy (http://justforeignpolicy.org), is an up-to-date source for getting the highlights of numerous articles on Afghanistan and other countries. Among the many items on the website today, August 23, 2010, the following one is from a report by Walter Pincus. It provides information on the Pentagon's plans to build very expensive facilities in Afghanistan. According to the report, the facilities will not be completed before July of 2011, after President Obama's conditional deadline for commencing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. The obvious implication is that, if there is a withdrawal at all, the Pentagon decision-makers think that the US-led occupation of Afghanistan will continue for some time after next summer.

Obama has also hedged his bets, as Tom Engelhart reminds us in the following quote from his book, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's:

"In his address [at West Point], Obama offered July 2011 as the date to begin withdrawing the first U.S. troops from Afghanistan. ('After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.') However, according to the Washington-insider 'Nelson Report,' a White House on-background press briefing made if far clearer that the president was talking about a 'conditions based withdrawal' that would depend 'on objective conditions on the ground,' on whether the Afghans had met the necessary 'benchmarks. When asked about 'scaling back' the American war effort, General McChrystal suggested a more conservative timeline - 'sometime before 2013.' Secretary of Defense Robert Gates referred vagule to the 'thinning out' of U.S. forces" (pp. 186-187).

From Just Foreign Policy, August 23, 2010:

Air base expansion plans reflect long-term investment in AfghanistanWalter Pincus, Washington Post, Monday, August 23, 2010; A06 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/22/AR2010082201670.html

Three $100 million air base expansions in southern and northern Afghanistan illustrate Pentagon plans to continue building multimillion-dollar facilities in that country to support increased U.S. military operations well into the future.

Despite growing public unhappiness with the Afghan war - and President Obama's pledge that he will begin withdrawing troops in July 2011 - many of the installations being built in Afghanistan have extended time horizons. None of the three projects in southern and northern Afghanistan is expected to be completed until the latter half of 2011. All of them are for use by U.S. forces rather than by their Afghan counterparts.

Overall, requests for $1.3 billion in additional fiscal 2011 funds for multiyear construction of military facilities in Afghanistan are pending before Congress. The House has approved the money, as has the Senate Appropriations Committee. The full Senate has yet to vote on the measure.

In addition, the United States has already allocated about $5.3 billion to construct facilities for the Afghan army and the national police, with most of the "enduring facilities . . . scheduled for construction over the next three to four years," according to a Pentagon news release this month.

For example, a $30 million contract was recently awarded to build a regional military training center in Mazar-e Sharif, according to Col. Mike Wehr, engineer director of the combined NATO training mission. That facility, too, will not be completed until late 2011, and then it will be used to train Afghans in various military specialties, including engineering."We're only about 25 percent complete in our construction [for Afghan security forces], and there is quite a bit more to go over the next three years," Wehr told a defense bloggers roundtable last week. One goal of the NATO transition program is to have Afghans ready to maintain these facilities by 2013, Wehr added.

The three bases being expanded for U.S. use after 2011 reflect the expectation of continued combat operations, but they are just part of a broader expansion of U.S. facilities across the country.[...]